This was one of my father’s favourite records. It has been in the family since the 70s – I am pretty sure that my father bought it at Sam the Record Man as soon as it came out in 1975 – and this record provides a tangible connection to my father, who died in 2012, and to the musical education that he gave me.

My father was not a trained musician, but he was a kind of self-taught scholar whose knowledge of classical music knew no limits. At a time when most of my friends parents listened to classical music, along with the pop, folk music, and jazz that filled out the playlists of their lives, my father listened to classical music intently, and with intensity. It was always on the car radio, and we always made a point of listening to the weekend opera broadcasts, sometimes with my Zeyde in his living room on Mountain Sights Ave. in Montreal. The smell of Zeyde’s cigar smoke pervades my earliest memories of Don Giovanni and Fidelio, as my father and grandfather explained the plots and sometimes sang along.

At home, my father would sit in his favourite chair in the living room, facing the speakers of the Sony stereo, listening closely, with his eyes half-closed and his right hand waving an imaginary baton. He heard every note and explained counterpoint and the sonata form between movements.

The baroque music revival was in full swing then, and we had a library featuring some of the great records of the time, by Neville Marriner and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, Claudio Scimone and I Solisti Veneti, and Maurice Andre. My father loved the music of the great French trumpeter, whose oeuvre consisted largely of baroque oboe concertos arranged for piccolo trumpet. It was the kind of thing that would make any early music enthusiast wince today, but the music was glorious nonetheless.

For my father, that was just the beginning. He dug deeper into the original oboe concertos and came out with this glorious record, a reissue of recordings that Scimoni had made in the 1960s. The maestro had been one of the big movers of the baroque revival of the 1960s, but he was always a bit skeptical of the historically informed performance practice (HIP) that came to dominate baroque music.

Both my father and I were eventually mostly won over to HIP but, listening to this record now, I find that this interpretation, with its glassy modern strings and the smooth tone of Pierre Pierlot’s oboe, so unlike the woodiness of a baroque instrument, just works. It might not be the most scholarly performance, but it is both elegant and full of all kinds of emotion, from joy to heartbreak. It's great record, and it has been a long time since I have listened. I understand my father's affection for it… And it brings me closer to him.