Interview: Irish Times ‘I had no idea what an oboe was’
Nicholas Daniel: ‘I had no idea what an oboe was. My father sold cars’
Michael Dervan, The Irish Times
Nicholas Daniel is not what you call a star of the oboe. He gives the impression that he wouldn’t ever want to be. And the oboe is one of those instruments that doesn’t really breed star performers in the first place.
But he is a really exceptional musician. He takes an instrument that can sound a little bit, well, incalcitrant, and broadens and deepens its expressive reach. It’s like he increases its vocabulary so that it can express new feelings and new musical shapes. All without any recourse to in-your-face virtuosity – unless, of course, that’s explicitly what the music demands.
Daniel shot to fame by winning the BBC Musician of the Future Competition at the age of 18 in 1980. But less than 10 years earlier, he tells me, “I had no idea what an oboe was. My father sold cars, and then he became a prison officer for the last half of his career. My mum was a homemaker, and then she did old ladies’ feet and a little bit of home-helping. It was not a musical household in any way. But it was a Christian church-going household.
“I think my mum said to me, would you like horse-riding lessons or to play the piano.” He was seven. “I thought horses were huge, so I said I’d play the piano. I was living in Hitchin in Hertfordshire, which has an extremely musical parish church, and my singing voice got to be kind of good. So my mum thought she would do as her sister had done, and put her own son in for King’s College, Cambridge.” The Choir of King’s College has long had the aura of being the apogee of church choral singing in England.