We are incredibly proud of our oboist and wind fixer, Ewan Millar, for his performance in the BBC Young Musician Grand Final. Ewan performed Oscar Navarro's concerto Legacy alongside the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Mark Wigglesworth in Manchester's Bridgewater Hall. Fiona Maddocks called his performance 'exemplary' and 'richly shaded' in the Guardian but this wasn't enough to receive the overall prize which went to percussionist Fang Zhang. Also in the final was horn player Annemarie Federle, who had premiered Cetus by Oxford undergraduate Will Harmer during her successes in the earlier stages of the competition.
The format of the Grand Final allowed the soloists the opportunity to be accompanied by a world class orchestra on national television, but this meant that Ewan couldn't perform his more varied programme which suited him so well in the Woodwind Final and Semi-Final stages. Earlier in the competition, Ewan had wowed audiences and judges with repertoire including Jeffrey Agrell’s Blues for DD, Peter Facer’s The Praying Mantis and the second of Schumann’s Three Romances.
Finalists of this prestigious and historic competition often go on to hugely successful musical careers and we hope that the same will be true for Ewan as he plans to pursue his postgraduate study in performance. This was certainly the case for clarinettist Mark Simpson, who won the competition two years before he came to Oxford as an undergraduate in 2008. Oxford's only other winner of the competition was pianist Anna Markland in 1982.
