Oboe
Biography
Trumpet, bass clarinet, saxophone and flute all came before the oboe for Russell Tyler, who plays principal oboe in the Orquestra do Norte in Portugal. He has appeared at the Sound Sensation festival in an ensemble drawn from the members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Tyler is English and settled on the oboe after hearing Mozart's Oboe Quartet. In 2018 he was diagnosed with superior semicircular canal dehiscence in the left ear; the first of three operations left that ear without hearing, and he stopped playing for about two years. He received a cochlear implant in September 2020, went through weekly speech therapy and returned to the orchestra, where he also plays in its wind quintet with Kayoko Minamino, Nuno Madureira, Joaquim Teixeira and Rebecca Holsinger. After a period away from playing following hearing loss, he returned to professional performance, describing that experience in a 2022 interview about music and cochlear implantation.