Robert Bloom

Robert Bloom (May 3, 1908 – February 13, 1994) was an oboist with an orchestral and solo career, a composer and arranger contributing to the oboe repertory, and a teacher of several successful oboists.^[1] Bloom is considered seminal in the development of an American school of oboe playing.^[2]

At the Curtis Institute of Music Bloom was a pupil of Marcel Tabuteau for three years.^[2] In the 1930s he played English horn in the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski and first oboe in the Rochester Philharmonic under José Iturbi.^[2] He was the principal oboe in Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1943.^[3] Bloom plays on recordings by the Columbia Symphony and the RCA Symphony.^[2]

In 1946 Bloom was one of the founding members of the Bach Aria Group, with which he played until 1980.^[1][2] Recordings by the Bach Aria Group featuring Bloom started appearing from the late 1940s.^[4] Bloom transcribed and elaborated 18th-century masterworks for the oboe.^[5] His own compositions include a Sonatina for oboe and piano.^[1]

Bloom was a professor at Yale and Juilliard.^[1] His pupils include William Bennett,^[6] Bill Douglas,^[7] Tim Hurtz,^[8] Richard Killmer,^[9] Bert Lucarelli,^[10] Ray Still,^[10][11] Allan Vogel,^[10] and Richard Woodhams,^[2] In the spring of 1988, friends, colleagues, and former pupils gathered in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York for an 80th-birthday tribute.^[2]

A few years after Bloom's death in 1994,^[12] his widow, Sara Lambert Bloom, published The Robert Bloom Collection, scores and parts to his 21 editions of 18th-century masterworks, 10 transcriptions, and 10 compositions.^[13] The Art of Robert Bloom, a 7-CD set of live performances of concertos, chamber music, and Bach arias performed by Bloom over his 60-year career was released in 2001 on Boston Records label.^[14]

Bloom's daughter, Kath Bloom is a singer-songwriter and music therapist based in Litchfield, CT.^[15]

• Bloom, Sara Lambert. "A Tribute to Robert Bloom". Double Reed, Volume 11, Number 3 (1988): 11–21.
• Bloom, Sara Lambert (editor), with contributions and/or quotations from Julius Baker, Samuel Baron, Robert Bloom, Susan Eischeid, Jerome Hoberman, David McGill, Leopold Stokowski, Robert Stumpf II, Daniel Webster and others. Robert Bloom: The Story of a Working Musician. rdg, 2009. (Addenda and errata: 2012) ISBN 9781934866115 OCLC 429118667
• Burgess, Geoffrey. "Bloom, Robert" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan Publishers. Second edition, 2001.
• Burgess, Geoffrey. "Bloom, Robert" in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, second edition, eight volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-19-531428-1.
• Galbraith, Amy M. The American School of Oboe Playing: Robert Bloom, John de Lancie, John Mack, and the Influence of Marcel Tabuteau. West Virginia University, 2011. ISBN 9781124894478
• Schwartz, Norman. "The Pavarotti of the Oboe: Robert Bloom" in The Double Reed, Volume 28 Number 1 (2005).
• Woodhams, Richard. "Robert Bloom, Eminent American Oboist." in The Instrumentalist, Volume 44, Number 4 (December 1989): 24–30.

• Official website