What city are you living in now? Silver Spring, MD
Where did you study? Eastman School of Music and University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music
What is your favorite piece of music? There is no one favorite piece. Right now I have Mahler 7 stuck in my head.
What do you enjoy in your spare time? Hiking, biking, baking, and sleeping
What is your fondest Annapolis Symphony memory? Playing Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony a few years back. The stage really is too small for such a piece, but the energy was great!
Rick Basehore, a Rochester, NY native, is an active freelance oboist in the DC metro area. His performing schedule includes orchestral concerts across the mid-Atlantic region from Norfolk, VA to New York City. He is currently the Principal Oboist of the Sarasota Opera and Allentown Symphony orchestras, and holds oboe and English Horn positions with the Annapolis, Harrisburg, and Maryland symphony orchestras. Rick can be heard on recordings of the Eastman Bach Children’s Choir, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and the Grammy-nominated professional choir, Seraphic Fire, including their recording of Bach’s Cantata 84.
Rick moved to DC in 2008 to assume the duties of Co-Principal Oboist with “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band. He spent his four-year enlistment playing for two presidents, various visiting foreign dignitaries, and tens of thousands of Americans on four separate tours across the country. Other previous positions include Principal Oboist of the Fairfax and Kentucky symphony orchestras, Second Oboist of the Binghamton Philharmonic, and Third Oboist of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra.
For 15 years, Rick travelled across the world, playing with music festivals in places such as Moscow, Jerusalem, Tallinn, Aspen, and Stuttgart. Between 1998 and 2002, Rick toured extensively across the United States with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. In December of 2000, when the world was awaiting its apocalyptic end, Rick wandered around historical sights across the Holy Land, in between rehearsing all nine Beethoven Symphonies on an Israeli kibbutz for an international music festival. A few weeks later, he spent two months playing with the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra in Yekaterinburg, Russia, as part of a cross-cultural residency program. It was here, during a sub-zero week in February, that Rick had his stage-speaking debut as the narrator in Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw – after the baritone engaged to perform the part was run off the stage during the first rehearsal by the conductor for being ill-prepared and insubordinate. In 2008, he was part of a new production of Porgy and Bess, featuring an all-American cast and orchestra at Paris’s famed Opera Comìque.
Rick studied with Richard Killmer at the Eastman School of Music and Mark Ostoich at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. He also spent three years in the New World Symphony, America’s only full-time training orchestra for professional musicians, led by Michael Tilson Thomas.
When he’s not practicing, performing, teaching, making reeds, or driving to a job, he is probably watching PBS, catching a frisbee, preparing someone’s taxes, or running PianoMart: the website his late uncle founded in 1997 to help people buying and selling pianos find each other online.