Gillian Bobnak

Gillian Bobnak is an American oboist who specializes in historical and modern oboes. She is newly based in France, where she is studying with Antoine Torunczyk at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Paris. She holds degrees from the New England Conservatory, where she was a student of Mark McEwen, and the Juilliard School, where she studied with Gonzalo Ruiz. At Juilliard, she worked with a wide array of esteemed faculty and guest artists, including William Christie, Paul Agnew, Jakob Lehmann, Lionel Meunier, Rachel Podger, Laurence Cummings, Peter Whelan, Laurence Equilbey, and Masaaki Suzuki. She has performed throughout the United States with groups such as the Oregon Bach Festival, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the San Francisco Early Music Festival with Vox Luminis, and Symphony in C. In the summer of 2023, she received a grant from the Netherlands-America Foundation to pursue a brief period of study with oboist Frank de Bruine at Koninklijk Conservatorium den Haag, and received a full scholarship for a week of study at the Vielklang Festival in Tübingen, Germany. Her interests include the performance of 17th and 18th century sacred German music, especially the vocal works of Johann Sebastian Bach and his predecessors; historical woodwind improvisation; early recordings and their relation to performance practice research; and France’s influence on the modern American oboe sound.