Nicholas Daniel
OBE has long been acknowledged as one of the world’s great oboists and is one of Britain’s best-known musicians. He has significantly enlarged the repertoire for his instrument with the commissioning of hundreds of new works. He has also developed a varied and exciting conducting career alongside his playing, and both these aspects of his work are equally important to him.

Nicholas dedicates his life to music in many varied ways. He records and broadcasts widely, he recently signed an exclusive contract with Chandos Records, and he boasts a huge following internationally on social media and on Streaming Apps such as Spotify and Apple Music. He is proud to support and patronise many important initiatives, charities and trusts, and has directed several music festivals and concert series, most notably in Germany and at Dartington, and has been Music Director of the Leicester International Music Festival and lunchtime series for many years. He is highly sought after as a teacher, having been Professor at the Trossingen Musikhochschule in Germany for more than 20 years.

As a conductor he made his BBC Proms conducting debut in 2004, and he works with many fine ensembles in hugely wide-ranging repertoire from Baroque to contemporary, from smaller groups to opera. He is Music Director of the Orion Orchestra in the UK, which bridges the gap for young musicians between Conservatoire-level education and the music profession. In recognition of his achievements, he was honoured in 2012 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with the prestigious Queen’s Medal for Music and cited as having made “an outstanding contribution to the musical life of the nation”. In October 2020 he was awarded an OBE and in 2022 was awarded the Cobbett Medal for Chamber Music by the Musicians’ Company.

Having sung as in the choir of Salisbury Cathedral as a boy, Nicholas was put directly into the spotlight at the age of 18 when he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. After a short period of study at London’s Royal Academy of Music, with Janet Craxton and Celia Nicklin and then privately with clarinettist Anthony Pay and with Hans Keller, he quickly established his career with early debuts at the BBC Proms and on disc.

He has been a concerto soloist with many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, performing a huge range of repertoire from Bach to Xenakis and beyond, premiering works written for him by hundreds of composers including Eleanor Alberga, Harrison Birtwistle, Henri Dutilleux, James MacMillan, Thea Musgrave, Outi Tarkiainen, John Tavener and Michael Tippett, as well as encouraging many younger composers to write for the oboe. His recording of concertos by Vaughan Williams and MacMillan was awarded the BBC Music Magazine Premiere Award in 2016, and the Vaughan Williams chosen as the best recording of the work in Gramophone in June 2023. He recently premiered and recorded a new Cor Anglais concerto, Milky Ways, by Outi Tarkianien.

As chamber musician Nicholas is a founder member of the award-winning Britten Sinfonia, the Haffner Wind Ensemble, Orsino, and the Britten Oboe Quartet, whose debut disc was released to great acclaim on the Harmonia Mundi label. He also works regularly with the pianists Huw Watkins and Julius Drake, and with many leading string quartets including the Carducci, Doric and Vogler. He is principal oboist of Camerata Pacifica, California’s leading chamber music ensemble, and is a popular guest at music festivals all over the world.

Nicholas Daniel plays Lorée Étoile Oboes and Royale English Horns from De Gourdon, Paris.

Outi Tarkiainen
is one of a new generation of composers whose work bears witness to the world around it and whose music engages audiences while advancing the art form without compromise. ‘I see music as a force of nature that can flood over a person and even change entire destinies,’ Outi has said.

Outi was born in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, a location that has proved a constant source of inspiration for her. She studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Eero Hämeenniemi and Veli-Matti Puumala, at the University of Miami with Ron Miller and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London with Malcolm Singer.

Since her student days, Outi has been drawn to the expressive power and natural truths of the human voice. In September 2016, the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, conductor John Storgårds and mezzo-soprano Virpi Räisänen gave the first performance of her orchestral song cycle to texts by Sami poets entitled The Earth, Spring’s Daughter (2015). The work’s structural finesse underlined the composer’s handling of large-scale forms while its pained lyricism revealed both her strong feelings about Sami emancipation and her love for the music of Alban Berg. May 2022 saw the world premiere of her first opera, commissioned and staged by Theater Hagen. A Room of One’s Own is based on the essay by Virginia Woolf and forms the latest in a series of works exploring womanhood, which also include the orchestral meditation on natural phenomena including childbirth, The Ring of Fire and Love (2020).

After making her name as a composer-conductor with some of Europe’s leading jazz orchestras, Outi collaborated with the Finnish vocalist Aili Ikonen on a series of jazz orchestra works including Into the Woodland Silence (2013), a score that combined the composer’s sense of natural mysticism with the distinctive textures of the jazz orchestra tradition. In the 2010s, she worked with some of Europe’s leading jazz orchestras including the Norrbotten Big Band, Umo Jazz Orchestra, Metropole Orchestra and the Slovenian Radio Big Band, all having won First Prize in the 2008 International Jazzverk Big Band Composition Competition with her piece Oglütz.

More recently, Outi has been commissioned by ensembles including the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, National Arts Center Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, Finnish Radio Symphony and Iceland Symphony Orchestras while her works have been taken up by the Minnesota Symphony, St Louis Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Hagen Philharmonic, Houston Symphony and Vienna Tönkunstler. Her intense connection to the northernmost reaches of Finland was adumbrated in Songs of the Ice (2019) and its sister piece Midnight Sun Variations, the latter premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 and subsequently performed around the world. The piece was nominated for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco’s Musical Composition Prize.

Outi has composed vocal, chamber and solo instrumental works as well as works for orchestra and soloist. Her saxophone concerto Saivo (2016), written for the saxophonist Jukka Perko, explores ideas of duality and illusion in both the saxophone and in concerto form itself. It was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2018 and later issued on record, alongside The Earth, Spring’s Daughter, by Ondine.

Outi has worked with some of the most distinguished conductors and musicians in Europe and America and has been composer-in-residence at the Festival de Musique Classique d’Uzerche in France. Her heart, however, remains in the north. ‘I have a fundamental longing for the northernmost regions within me,’ she has said. She has been co-artistic director of the annual Silence Festival in Lapland and for a time lived in the far northern town of Ivalo, 300km north of Rovaniemi. The wilderness of Europe’s northernmost reaches continues to find expression in her music’s engrossing combination of beauty and brutality, of richness and sparseness. (Andrew Mellor)