Biography

GRAMMY-nominated oboist Claire Chenette has been principal oboe with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra since 2014. Additionally, Claire performs in varied settings as a member of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Des Moines Metro Opera, Wildup modern music collective, and Nief Norf. Claire has been a regular guest with the San Diego, Pacific, and Chattanooga Symphonies and the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestras, among others.

In addition to her orchestral career, Claire is equally at home as a soloist performing concerti–from Vivaldi to Mozart to Viet Cuong–with the Knoxville Symphony, as a teaching artist at educational institutions such as UNC School of the Arts and Lucerne Festival Academy, and as a curator crafting collaborative interdisciplinary projects. An advocate for new music, Claire holds a position as a Contemporary Leader with the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, where she co-curates Lucerne Festival Forward and Lucerne Festival Academy. She has also been featured at cutting-edge venues such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, the New York Philharmonic’s Biennial, the Big Ears and Ojai Festivals, among others. Claire spends her summers as a faculty member at the Lucerne Festival Academy, the Nief Norf Summer Festival, and the North Carolina Governor’s School.

Claire also plays folk music and is passionate about interdisciplinary projects that blur genres and subvert traditional expectations of what classical music is and who it is for. Recent projects include collaboratively scoring the experiential theater production STYX Tours for Luzerner Theater, developing a lecture recital/live sauerkraut demo titled Culture is a Verb: Exploring the connections between fermentation, social change, and artistic practice, and writing a space rock musical about reproductive freedom on Planet Chattanooga.