When, where and what did you play the first time with The English Concert?

The first time I played with The English Concert was in November 2022 at Coventry Cathedral, where we performed and recorded Handel’s Messiah.

What has been your most memorable TEC concert and why?

The concert that will forever be etched in my memory is Bach’s Mass in B minor, which we performed at St Martin-in-the-Fields under the direction of Kristian Bezuidenhout in February 2025. I received some sad news just before the concert started, and the mixture of emotions, coupled with the special atmosphere created by us all playing this magnificent and sublime music, made this one of the best and most inspiring concerts of my life.

What’s one of your favourite pieces of music and why?

A few years ago, I found out that there was music in the archives of the cathedral of Zamora – my home city in Spain – which were composed by the chapel masters in the 17th and 18th centuries. I even found several pieces written for oboe, which turned out to be some of the earliest compositions for this instrument in Spain. Although they are very little known to the general public, they are now among my favourite pieces of music. I ended up recording some of these pieces on my ensemble’s first CD, “Miércoles de Tinieblas”, which is available for anyone who wants to discover them!

Is there anything about you that would surprise people?

I started music playing one of the traditional instruments from my region: the flute and the tambourin. The flute only has three holes, so it can be played with one hand while the other plays the tambourin, making different rhythms to accompany the melody. It’s not a very common way to start playing music, but I was completely in love with this instrument!

Biography

After studying modern oboe in Freiburg, Basel and Paris, Spanish oboist Clara Espinosa Encinas continued her studies in the field of early music, specialising in baroque oboe with Katharina Arfken at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and with Antoine Toruncyk at the CRR (Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional) in Paris.

She is currently principal oboe of The English Concert and collaborates with other orchestras such as Les Arts Florissants, Les Talents Lyriques, Le Concert de la Loge, Concerto Copenhagen, Bach Stiftung St. Gallen or the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, among others.

She is also the co-founder of the Ensemble Semura Sonora, with which she has spent several years leading a project to rediscover and perform music from unexplored musical manuscripts found in the archives of Zamora Cathedral, her home city in Spain.