Biography
Declan Hickey is a classical guitarist based in London. Having studied at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music, he has since maintained an active performance career, appearing at such venues as the Purcell Room, St John’s Smith Square, LSO St Luke’s, Kings Place, St James’s Piccadilly, and the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room, and live on BBC Radio 3. As both a soloist and chamber musician, he has won awards from organisations including the Worshipful Company of Musicians (2025 Ivor Mairants Award, 2nd Prize), the International Guitar Foundation (Young Artist Platform, 2023–2024) and Help Musicians (Postgraduate Awards, 2021 and 2022).
Chamber music occupies a central part of Declan’s musical life. He performs regularly with violinist Eliza Nagle as the Regency Duo, and with saxophonist Sophia Elger as the Tondo Duo. Other partnerships include those with recorder player Lizzie Knatt, guitarist Michael Matthews, and a host of singers including Ally Dunavant and Mia Serracino-Inglott. Ever keen to expand the repertoires for these ensembles, Declan is both an active arranger and commissioner, and is well known for unearthing forgotten gems from existing musical catalogues.
As a soloist, Declan has appeared throughout the UK and abroad, including a recital at the Lidköping Music Festival in Sweden in 2017. He specialises in post-War and contemporary British music, including the complete guitar works of Lennox Berkeley and Michael Tippett, and the much overlooked music of Priaulx Rainier and Elisabeth Lutyens. Current solo programmes include works by Oran Johnson, Roberto Gerhard and Leo Brouwer.
Declan is passionate about new music. In 2023, he was invited to join musicians from the London Sinfonietta, the UK’s flagship contemporary music ensemble, in two performances of Harrison Birtwistle’s The World is Discovered. He has worked closely with a number of distinguished composers, including Grammy nominee Mica Levi, Stephen Goss, Effy Efthymiou and Greg Caffrey. In 2021, Declan received close guidance from Judith Weir, then Master of the Queen’s Music, on her piece Gentle Violence for guitar and piccolo. His largest-scale premiere to date is the 11-movement song cycle Roma Indicta, a setting by Jonty Lefroy Watt of words by Zadie Loft, which Declan will reprise with Mia Serracino-Inglott at the Presteigne Festival spring series in 2026. Other premieres to Declan’s name include works by Oliver Rudland, Toby Anderson, Declan Molloy, Jack Gionis and Archie John.
Happily coexisting with this interest in new music is Declan’s fascination with musical culture of the early 19th century. As founder and director of the ensemble Harmonicon, he is actively reviving the ‘Great Vogue’ for the guitar which swept across Europe in the early decades of the 19th century. Declan has curated intimate, salon-style performances at such appropriate venues as Burgh House and Downing College, Cambridge, in which historically-informed musical items are placed alongside readings and forms of audience interaction. He performs on a period guitar made by William Hanbury, and on various other historical guitars of varying size and number of strings.
Declan’s historical performance practice is fuelled by his research into British musical life of the early 19th century. He is the world’s leading authority on the musician William Ball (c1784–1869), and is a member of the Cambridge Cohort for Guitar Research. In June 2025, he will deliver a paper at the Guitar Foundation of America’s academic symposium at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, focusing on Ball’s guitar literature of the 1820s and 1830s. In January 2025, he delivered a lecture-recital as part of the launch event for Sarah Clarke’s The Periodicals of Ferdinand Pelzer. Declan is a frequent programme note writer for festivals including Lake District Summer Music and the Barnes Music Festival, and his writings have appeared in the Lennox Berkeley Society Journal.
Declan took a starred first-class degree in Music from the University of Cambridge, where he won the Holgate Pollard Memorial Prize for the highest mark in his final examinations. This was followed by a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied guitar performance with Michael Lewin and Fabio Zanon.
