Gareth Hulse

Gareth Hulse is one of Britain's top ensemble and orchestral oboists, performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Nash Ensemble, among other groups. He has also appeared on several major film soundtracks and is an important educator. Hulse took up the oboe at age 11 as the result of a coin flip. Entering a school music program, he did not like the sound of the violin, and his parents ruled out a brass instrument. The remaining available wind instruments were an oboe and a bassoon, and Hulse and a fellow student flipped a coin for the right to choose. Hulse won and picked the oboe because it was easier to carry, but he quickly showed talent and continued to play the oboe while studying music at Cambridge University. After graduating, he continued oboe studies with Janet Craxton at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg with Heinz Holliger, whom he has named as the player he most admires. Returning to Britain, he became principal oboist of the Royal Northern Sinfonia in North East England. Hulse moved on to similar positions with the English National Opera, the London Philharmonic, and the London Sinfonietta, a position he continues to hold as of the early 2020s. With that group, he has shown an affinity for performing concertos by modern composers, including Berio, Penderecki, and Ligeti. Hulse has been perhaps most visible as a chamber player. He is a longtime member of the Nash Ensemble, with which he has performed internationally, and with which his recording career began in 1988 with an album of music by Oliver Knussen. Hulse is a founder of the London Winds, appearing with that group on recordings of Mozart's wind serenades and the complete wind music of Richard Strauss, and he played on a 1998 recording of Ligeti's chamber music that earned a Grammy Award nomination. In 2009, he joined the London Mozart Players. Hulse's more than 60 albums include seven film soundtracks, among them 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. In 2021, he was heard on the album Dedication: The Chamber Music of Ruth Gipps. Hulse is a member of the faculty at the Royal College of Music.
© James Manheim /TiVo