Featured Artist: Oliver Talukder

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[00:00:00]
Jason Croft: Good evening from Urbana and the University of Illinois. It's Prairie Performances, WILL's weekly show presenting classical and jazz from the heart of the prairie in central Illinois. Prairie Performances is made possible in part by funding from the John Frayne Graduate Student Classical Music Work Experience Endowment.

[00:00:28]
Mel Miller: Good evening and welcome to Prairie Performances. I'm Mel Miller. Tonight we're featuring a musician who was born in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in Glenview. Oliver Talukder is a Mexican-Bengali oboist and winner of Cedille Records' 2025 Emerging Artist Competition. Now, his debut solo album, Briefly Gorgeous, is releasing on Sept. 4th.

[00:00:52]
Oliver Talukder: My name is Oliver Talukder. I'm an oboist, musician, teaching artist from Glenview, Illinois, and I'm so excited for the release of my album Briefly Gorgeous, which releases on September 4th, 2026. I was born in Evanston and I grew up in Glenview to two amazing parents, Laura and Kamal Talukder, with two great older brothers. Yeah, we grew up in a cute little house in Glenview, Illinois in a very vibrant suburb--set of suburbs. A lot of the positive qualities that I see in my life can be traced back to growing up in such a diverse and beautiful neighborhood. My best friends growing up, their families were from the Philippines, from Thailand, from Jordan, from Poland. So I feel like that diversity really, really helped my artistry now.

I went to Maine East High School. I'm very proud of going to Maine East High School, which is another example of that great diversity that I grew up with. All of my artistic foundation was laid in the public schools that I went to. I started off in school band, 5th grade. I picked up the saxophone and the rest is history, and I have to thank all my teachers from back then for where I am now.

My musical childhood, I would say, was filled with such a great vast variety of music. Some of my earliest memories of music was when I was in the car. I really hated car rides. I still hate car rides and they make me car sick, but back then I remember that the only thing that would stop me from having a tantrum, having, you know, crying were these two CDs that my parents would put in the stereo in the car. One of them was this Baby Mozart CD and the other was the soundtrack to this Bollywood movie called "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham." I really enjoy the dichotomy between those two because that really describes kind of my musical taste now. Like I love my classical stuff. I love my world music and everything in between.

Right now, oh, this is so exciting actually. I've been really, really obsessed with this great piece for large orchestra by Gabriela Ortiz called Revolución Diamantina, and it's this really, really great piece that describes the Glitter Revolution that happened in Mexico, which was a feminist revolution to combat the femicide and the domestic abuse against women in Latin America but specifically in Mexico. It's about an hour long, but it's just filled with this vibrant energy and just this like revolutionary power. Like when I'm listening to it, I feel like I want to, you know, march along with my fellow sisters to fight against the machismo, you know, and so that's been on repeat. I would highly recommend you to give it a listen at some point.

[00:03:31]
Mel Miller: The Ortiz is certainly an interesting piece. The ballet features a Greek — or in this case Mexican — chorus who in the final movement can be heard repeating the word "todas," meaning "all" or "every" in the grammatical feminine, as in "all women." You'll hear that final movement of the Revolución Diamantina by Gabriela Ortiz shortly, but first, a recording from 2022 of Francis Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Winds, Op. 100, where you can hear Oliver Talukder on oboe. That's up next on Prairie Performances.

Revolución Diamantina, or the Glitter Revolution, by Gabriela Ortiz, a 2025 work that oboist Oliver Talukder has been listening to on repeat. Before that, you heard Talukder playing oboe in a 2022 performance of Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Winds. Oliver Talukder is the winner of Cedille Records' 2025 Emerging Artist competition and our feature artist for tonight's Prairie Performances. I'm your host, Mel Miller. Let's hear what Oliver had to say about his experience entering that competition. How did you hear about this competition?

[00:23:03]
Oliver Talukder: I heard about it through one of the music programs that I was a part of in high school, the Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative. It was a program that was started my senior year of high school with the goal of providing resources to young musicians from underserved communities or underrepresented backgrounds to have the resources to make it to top-level conservatories for classical music. I got an email from the program director James Hall, and he thought of me. He saw the ad for the competition. He sent me an email and I read through it. I was like, yeah, this is right up my alley. So I entered, not thinking I would even get past the first round, but I was like, what the heck? I'm going to apply. I worked on a lot of solo repertoire when I was in my undergrad, so I have my variety of repertoire I can choose from.

[00:23:50]
Mel Miller: How did you choose what music you were going to play?

[00:23:53]
Oliver Talukder: I wanted to choose the music that best represented my artistic strength. And also just the music that I have fun playing. I think when I see performers do their thing on stage, I'm most captivated when they're doing something that they obviously are having so much fun performing, whether that's, you know, whether I'm going to a dance performance, whether I'm, you know, watching a classical music performance, whether I'm watching a drag queen, you know, at a bar, and so I wanted to do that with myself. They asked for a couple of videos of contrasting pieces. It was very open ended, and then for the semifinal and final round, they asked us to prepare 60 minutes of music.

That final round, I wanted to tell a story and I just picked the stuff that I just really thought was emotionally intriguing. I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, I started with the Marina Dranishnikova, the Poème — a little bit of an insider secret. Sometimes, you know, when performers are walking on stage, you can get a little nervous like right in that moment, especially for wind players. You know, we have to control our breathing, and so I chose the Marina Dranishnikova to start with because it has this like minute-long piano intro. So in case I felt, you know, very nervous and a little bit breathless, I could have that moment of meditation.

It just felt like a full circle moment for me because, like, my family would always go to all my performances in Chicago and then I moved to Philadelphia to go to Curtis and I didn't have my family in the audience anymore, and this kind of felt like a homecoming performance in a sense.

[00:25:24]
Mel Miller: A homecoming performance in more than one sense. Talukder mentioned later in our interview that he'd actually recorded with CD once before as a member of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra for the premiere recording of Michael Abels' Winged Creatures. You can see a young Talukder playing oboe in the booklet for that album and you can hear him playing in the ensemble up next. After that, you'll hear the Poème by Marina Dranishnikova from Talukder's upcoming album, Briefly Gorgeous. This is the piece Talukder used as his opening in the final round of the 2025 Cedille Emerging Artists competition. A full circle indeed here on Prairie Performances.

Poème by Marina Dranishnikova as performed by Oliver Talukder for his solo debut album Briefly Gorgeous. Before that, you heard a younger Talukder performing in the ensemble of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra for their recording of Michael Abels' Winged Creatures featuring soloists Demarre and Anthony McGill. You're listening to Prairie Performances. I'm your host, Mel Miller. Oliver [Talukder] is our featured artist this evening and the winner of CD Records' 2025 Emerging Artist competition. Per the competition rules, the winning contestant earns the opportunity to record a solo debut album with CD. Now, Talukder's work is coming to fruition with the release of his album Briefly Gorgeous. So, the title of the album Briefly Gorgeous is based on a book. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

[00:46:50]
Oliver Talukder: One of my favorite novels — and I recently reread it for like the 3rd time — it's called On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and it's just a beautiful novel about this main character. His name is Little Dog, and the entire novel is written as a long-form letter to his illiterate mother, and so it's very emotionally raw, it's very honest, talks about themes of love, the complexities of love, living in diaspora. The family, they're Vietnamese immigrants, and what living in the U.S. as an immigrant is like. He experiences a lot of self-discovery as he experiences his queer journey, his first, you know, kind of boyfriend-ish, and it was a novel that really put words to a lot of my own experiences. And so this story is sort of like a large coming-of-age story and I wanted this album to feel like a musical coming-of-age story.

I'm taking all of, you know, experiences from my childhood, from my family, from my undergrad experience and what I learned from moving away from my family, moving away from that really beautifully diverse area that I grew up in into sort of a very homogeneous, very white school. I mean, I'm going to be honest, the classical music world is very white, for better or for worse, but it's not as inclusive as it should be. And I felt that with this album I wanted to go against the grain. During my undergrad experience, sometimes I felt moments where I had to hide my identity, that it couldn't be a part of my oboe playing, it couldn't be a part of my classical music playing. I felt that this album was a great opportunity for me to make it my own and say, hey, yes, I can play all of that music by dead white composers, but listen to this exciting stuff that is by living composers of color and women.

One piece in particular that I think will be a part of the oboe standard repertoire is the Rina Ismail piece, Jhula Jhule — gorgeous piece by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail that takes a lot of influence from classical Indian Carnatic singing, and she combines it with folk songs that she heard growing up from her Indian background along with some lullabies that her grandparents would sing her, and she combined that in a Western classical music context. But I feel like I'm able to interpret it maybe closer to the way that she heard it in her head because of the Bollywood music that I grew up in that also has roots in Indian Carnatic singing.

I recently watched a video on YouTube of one of my former teachers, Richard Woodhams, talking about — it was like an interview around the time that he was performing the Christopher Rouse oboe concerto — and he said this really profound statement. I'm not going to quote him directly because I can't remember it directly, but he was saying like, yes, as classical music performers, we have an obligation to perform these pieces that have stood the test of time, but he was saying that we also have an artistic obligation to play the music of today.

[00:49:56]
Mel Miller: Oliver Talukder's debut solo album Briefly Gorgeous comes out on Sept. 4th. Thank you so much for listening to Prairie Performances. I've been your host, Mel Miller. Tonight I'll leave you with a piece Talukder mentioned during our interview, one he felt personally connected to. This is his rendition of Reena Esmail's Jhula Jhule. Thank you so much for listening with me this evening here on Prairie Performances. Prairie Performances is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm your host, Mel Miller. I hope you'll join me next time.