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5 Incredible Contemporary Classical Players

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USA
Who is on your list for today's legit players?

The following restrictions should be obvious, but just in case they are not the following restrictions are in place/
They must be alive and well.
Dead players from 30 years ago don't count.
Retired players, are retired. Today's players must be active.
Professors count.
Classical, not Jazz or Pop.

Let the knowledge begin.
 
I don’t wish to embarrass him, but how about our very own David Roach?

@David Roach are you legit?
Well........
Let's put it this way, my life has been a constant battle between musical styles, one or other becoming dominant depending upon the way the employment wind blew.
I started my playing life at about 11 or 12 y/o as a clarinettist and hated it mostly because my teacher insisted on a double embouchure, which I found extremely painful. This started to change when I was 14 and I moved schools and had a very kind teacher who showed me single-lip. However, despite the shattering enlightenment of the possibility of improvisation (as opposed to reading music), I still was not a great fan of the clarinet: externally, because it's not an instrument that features in Rock music, internally because it just doesn't do anything for me subjectively.

I began to play Sax & Flute when I was 15, but after doing a few grades on Clarinet and still being unimpressed, and at that time not able to do grades on Sax, and being star struck by Andy Mackay from Roxy Music, I took up the Oboe at 16 or 17. This went much better from a classical point of view and I fluked Grade 8 with Distinction within a year of starting to play the Oboe. Obviously my upper lip had decided that the pain was worth it for the Oboe! And since Music College was the only place I wanted to be after school, and the idea of being there on Clarinet filled me with dread, I auditioned on Oboe.

I failed my auditions at the RCM and RAM and lucked in at Trinity College which was at that time in central London in James Street. I had a marvellous 4 years there with a lovely professor called Stephen Nagy. Stephen was very cool and understanding when, having passed my LTCL, he turned a blind eye in my third year as I went off on tour with Billy Ocean, played baritone with NYJO (very poorly) and started the Myrha Sax Quartet with John Harle etc. and started playing in the Foyer of the NT with Dominic Muldowney.

After College I lucked in again and was almost immediately booked for BBC's Play School with Jonathan Cohen's Band, worked more at the NT and the Myrha Qtet, toured with other pop singers and so on.

So, long story short my musical life has been shaped by my experiences from basically two angles, Classical Oboe and Rock Sax.

I believe myself to be a bluffer as a classical sax player, albeit quite a convincing one, although I did have a penchant for tenor sax which IMO almost nobody can do well in classical music.. I never enjoyed the solo classical repertoire, but I did enjoy playing in the Myrha Quartet (actually, not entirely, but that's a can of worms I will not open).
Then came Michael Nyman, so between the MNB, the NT, the Philharmonia Orchestra and bits and pieces of session work, I was covering quite a bit of musical ground. I even enjoyed playing clarinet once or twice (with a very open mouthpiece!). My relationship with the Oboe, clarinet and flute stopped and started which made things very difficult, so in 1998 I decided to stop doubling for good.
In the late 90s and the 00s I was really doing pretty much all classical music. I joined the Apollo Qtet for a while on baritone, but to be honest the baritone is not my instrument, and I did not enjoy driving up the M6 to Manchester (who would? :)). 2009 was a watershed for me and I stopped most of what I was doing apart from the Nyman Band and got involved in IT, which my nerdy side was quite taken by.

So as you can see I have had multiple personalities as a musician which has made my life rather difficult and has ended up with me being neither one thing nor the other, a Jack of all trades at one time, which has not been what I set out to be. I have been very distracted by 'all the possibilities' and although a friend once very kindly called me a 'Renaissance Man', I felt as if I could never manage to do what the really successful doublers do, which is to retain their own personality whatever they were playing, I felt as if I were a Zelig, but actually not entirely comfortable anywhere.

This is probably far more info than you bargained for, but I was in the mood to relate this today!
 
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Absolutely Amy Dickson, an amazing artist.

I would also like to add Jess Gillam, a young girl in her 20's taking the world by storm (IMHO). There's just something about the effortless way she plays. If memory serves she was part of the BBC young musician of the year show sometime back. I've heard her play many different genres but can definitely hold her own in the classical group!
 
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