Performer, curator and on-stage host, James Austin Smith “proves that an oboist can have an adventurous solo career.” (New Yorker). Praised for his “virtuosic,” “dazzling,” and “brilliant” performances (New York Times), James Austin Smith appears regularly at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and at leading national and international chamber music festivals, at Carnegie Hall and on tour as Co-Principal Oboe of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and as an artist of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
As Artistic and Executive Director of Tertulia Chamber Music Mr. Smith creates intimate evenings of food, drink, and music designed to engage audiences hungry for singular cultural experiences in New York, San Francisco and Serenbe, Georgia, as well as an annual weekend festival of food and music in a variety of global destinations. He serves as Artistic Advisor to Coast Live Music, a new home for chamber music in the San Francisco Bay Area. He mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University and the Manhattan School of Music, and as a regular guest at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
In the fall of 2023 Mr. Smith presented Hearing Memory, an evening of performance, story-telling and archival film footage documenting a clutch of politically engaged musicians in the former East Germany. Describing the event in The New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote, “no less virtuosic was Smith’s running commentary on the East German context. His deployment of videos, including some of musical discussions that he had found in television archives, gave the evening the feeling of a live documentary. For any young performer seeking an alternative to the usual walk-out-and-play routines, this impeccable event could serve as a model.”
In 2024 Smith joins the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for two national tours, appears as soloist with the Cape Town, Johannesburg and Kwa-Zulu Natal Philharmonic Orchestras, and in recital across South Africa with pianist Luis Magalhães. He presents a weekend festival of music and food in Berlin, Germany with Tertulia Chamber Music, as well as a slate of specially-curated events in New York, San Francisco and Serenbe, Georgia, and joins violinist Livia Sohn in launching Coast Live Music in the hills above Silicon Valley. Summer festival appearances include Music@Menlo, the Bridgehampton and Portland Chamber Music Festivals, Bay Chamber Concerts and Holland’s Stift Festival; together with oboist Christian Wetzel he presents Hearing Memory in Cologne, Germany, in New York City and at Stony Brook University.
James Austin Smith holds a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music and bachelor’s degrees in political science and music from Northwestern University. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, and is an alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Smith’s principal teachers are Stephen Taylor, Christian Wetzel, Humbert Lucarelli, and Ray Still.
