New Artist of the Month:
Oboist Oliver Talukder

Graduating from the ultra-selective Curtis Institute of Music is an achievement in and of itself. But Oliver Talukder [tah-LOOK-der], 23, has become a legend even in Curtis’s hallowed halls. During the school’s annual holiday skit show, the oboist astonished his peers by belting out a complete rendition of “Der Hölle Rache,” the famous Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute. Well, mostly complete: He whipped a piccolo from his suit pocket to hit the high Fs.

“I've always known that, in a past life, I was a high coloratura soprano diva,” he quips. 

Talukder’s vigorous multitasking and bubbly personality served him well in the spring, when he won Cedille Records’ Emerging Artist Competition. Open to any musician under the age of 35 with a Chicago tie, the competition, by the standards of most classical music competitions, is wide open. “When you give people no rules, then they create something that you would never have even thought of,” Talukder says.

During the competition, Talukder spoke passionately about being raised in an immigrant household—his mother is from Mexico, his father from Bangladesh—in north suburban Glenview, IL. He performed Marina Dranishnikova’s Poem and Jeffrey Agrell’s Blues for D.D., both featured on his senior recital at Curtis, as well as sections from oboist/composer Alyssa Morris’s Four Personalities. It was all capped by his own arrangement of Arturo Márquez’s “Danzon No. 2,” progressing from oboe to English horn to flute and piccolo.

Cedille’s competition winner gets an all-expenses-paid debut album on the Chicago-based label. (The inaugural winner was Julian Velasco, a member of ~Nois saxophone quartet, also named a New Artist of the Month last year.) Talukder plans for his as-of-yet-untitled record to explore “themes of love, identity, and home,” taking the repertoire he performed on his competition program as a starting point. He’ll augment it with two works by composers with Chicago ties: Reena Esmail’s Jhula Jhule, and art songs and spiritual arrangements by Florence Price. It’ll be rounded out with a commission by Curtis composition student Delfin Demiray; the piece is inspired by Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an epistolary novel addressed to Vuong’s immigrant mother.

Whenever Talukder enters a space in classical music, he keeps an eye peeled for his fellow “Latinos and South Asian baddies.” His debut album will be an extension of that community.

“I’m paying tribute to my parents and the unique blends of cultures that have shaped me,” he says. “I could never imagine leaving home and starting a whole new life from nothing… I want to inspire other people who come from an intersectional background to find their place in this industry.”

Early days

Talukder is the baby of his family, with two brothers eight and six-and-a-half years older than him. Though their parents aren’t musicians, all three boys became serious musicians. In fact, Talukder first became “enamored” with the oboe’s sound at his brother’s youth orchestra concert, hearing the sinuous solos all over Scheherazade. He still credits the piece with inspiring his love of classical music.

“Even to an untrained ear, that storytelling element was so satisfying,” he recalls.

But Talukder’s school music teachers didn’t let students start on oboe—they didn’t want kids to get discouraged by the stiff learning curve and quit music altogether. He started on saxophone instead, before finally getting a crack at the oboe in sixth grade, once he’d been “deemed worthy.” Along the way, he also picked up the flute and piccolo.

Talukder credits several Chicago-based music programs with preparing him for the rigors of Curtis. He spent four years in the top ensemble of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra (CYSO); he still considers CYSO Music Director Allen Tinkham and chamber music coach Donald DeRoche, who died in June, as formative mentors. Talukder pursued additional education at the People’s Music School, a nonprofit offering free lessons and programs in Chicago’s melting-pot Uptown neighborhood. Through the then-new Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative, which trains underrepresented young orchestral musicians for conservatory auditions, he also studied with Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal oboe Will Welter, himself a Curtis alum.

At Curtis, Talukder studied with Richard Woodhams, Katherine Needleman, and Philippe Tondre. He credits Woodhams with building his “foundation” as a player and praised Needleman and Tondre’s shared studio for exposing students to different schools of playing. “There's this big divide between the American style of oboe playing and the European style,” Talukder says. “Getting a point of view from someone who plays in the European style really expanded my musical color palette.”

That palette was grabbing ears before the Cedille competition. Talukder won first place in the collegiate division of the Midwest Double Reed Society Competition in 2022 and was named Outstanding Instrumentalist in the Sphinx Orchestral Partners Audition Competition in 2024.

Since graduating, Talukder’s predilection for musical storytelling has led him to opera, his current musical “obsession.” He currently plays as Opera Philadelphia’s second oboe, a gig he nabbed while still studying at Curtis, and works as a part-time operations assistant for the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra. In his spare time, you can usually find him dancing—whether sniffing out salsa nights or other Latin dance get-togethers on the festival circuit or getting certified as a dance fitness instructor back home in Philly.

As for the future? Besides his forthcoming debut record, Talukder is eyeing going back to school. Nor has he given up on the idea of becoming the principal oboe of a major orchestra someday.

In the meantime, he’s enjoying the creative freedom only a freelance career can offer. At the time he connected with Musical America, Talukder was one of just a few American instrumentalists invited to play at Festival Paax GNP, a two-week orchestral concert series in Cancún led by Alondra de la Parra. At one point, he flipped the camera around to show off the view from his hotel balcony—the blue-on-blue of sky and sea, broken only by palm trees lazily flapping in the breeze. Nice work, if you can get it.

“My attitude with a lot of things,” he says, with a sun-drenched grin, “is, ‘Let’s roll with this and see what happens.’”