In Praise of the Oboe—and Its Makers

In Wednesday’s (1/14) New York Times, Jesse Green writes, “Jim Phelan, who owns the Laubin oboe company, has a neat white mustache and sparkly hazel eyes …  Recently surveying his small, busy workshop 60 miles north of New York City, he called it his ‘island of misfit toys.’… The workshop felt more like a family hardware store … than a sensible instrument manufactory. I found it hard to believe that anything as beautiful and persnickety as an oboe ever escaped its chaos until the operations manager … grabbed an instrument from the desk of a finisher and tossed off a test run of sweet, gorgeous Bach. What then seemed hard to believe was that anyone was ever willing to live without such a sound, and thus without the bizarre, expensive machines that make it…. [A. Laubin is] the oldest and perhaps last substantial American company specializing in professional oboes, as well as their sultrier sisters, English horns … Laubins, however, were long prized for their beauty of tone … quite distinct from the sparklier timbre of the world-leading French brand, Lorée…. The company, named for its founder, Alfred Laubin, was a super-high-end atelier, less about commerce than craft.”