President - Prof. George Caird MA FRAM

Oboist, teacher and educator extraordinaire George Caird still enjoys a highly diverse life in music and the arts which has led him to perform all over the world. George is married to the cellist Jane Salmon and now, both a father and grandfather, lives in Oxford.In his youth he studied the oboe with Janet Craxton and Evelyn Barbirolli at the Royal Academy of Music, with Helmut Winschermann at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie, and privately with Neil Black. Having gained an MA in music at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he pursued a freelance career as an oboist playing with major orchestras including the London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and the City of London Sinfonia. For a decade until 1993 he was a member of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. A member at that time of leading ensembles he was a founder-member of The Albion Ensemble, Vega Wind Quintet and Caird Oboe Quartet.

Throughout his career George has been a committed teacher; professor of oboe at the Royal Academy of Music in 1984 he became head of woodwind three years later, and finally head of orchestral Studies in 1989. Then in September 1993, he was appointed principal of the Birmingham Conservatoire, a post that he held for the following seventeen years. From 2011 until last year George was Artistic Director of the Rotterdam Classical Music Academy, Codarts in Rotterdam. Back now in the UK he continues to teach the oboe at Birmingham Conservatoire and is president of the Barbirolli International Oboe Competition which next takes place on the Isle of Man in April 2017.

He is an internationally recognised artist who has performed in China, the Far East, India, Egypt, Tunisia and Canada as well as in concerts and broadcasts in most European countries. He has taken part in many orchestral recordings as well as recording a wide repertoire of solo and chamber music including ‘An English Renaissance’ of quintets and quartets for oboe and strings, and Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid as part of his published study on that work. Many works have been composed for him such as Paul Patterson’s Duologue, John Gardner’s Second Oboe Sonata, Andrew Downes’ sonata, In the Gardens of Burdwan and John Mayer’s Abhut Sangit.