Biography
Declan Hickey is a classical guitarist based in the UK. Since his international debut at the Lidköping Music Festival (Sweden) in 2017, he has appeared at a string of major British venues—the Purcell Room, Kings Place, St John’s Smith Square, LSO St Luke’s, St James’s Piccadilly, the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room—and live on BBC Radio 3. In recent years he has appeared at festivals including Presteigne, Folkestone New Music, Deal Music and Arts, and Classical Pride. As both a soloist and chamber musician, Declan has won awards from organisations including the Worshipful Company of Musicians, the International Guitar Foundation, and Help Musicians. He specialises in post-War and contemporary British music, including the complete guitar works of Lennox Berkeley, Elisabeth Lutyens, Michael Tippett, and Priaulx Rainier.
Declan is especially active as a chamber musician. He has performed extensively with violinist Eliza Nagle as the Regency Duo, and with saxophonist Sophia Elger as the Tondo Duo. Other partnerships include those with early keyboard specialist Nathaniel Mander, guitarist Michael Matthews, recorder player Lizzie Knatt, and a host of singers including Lucy Gibbs, Daniel Gilchrist, Ally Dunavant and Mia Serracino. Ever keen to expand the repertoires for these ensembles, Declan is an active arranger and commissioner, and is well-known for unearthing forgotten gems from existing musical catalogues.
A devotee of contemporary music, Declan has performed alongside the London Sinfonietta—the UK’s flagship contemporary music ensemble—in performances of Harrison Birtwistle’s The World is Discovered. He has worked closely with a number of distinguished composers, including BAFTA-nominated Mica Levi, Alec Roth, 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 premieres to date include two works by Jonty Lefroy Watt: the 11-movement song cycle Roma Indicta, and Portraits in Grey, a 40-minute work for violin and guitar centred on the musical artworks of Juan Gris. Other premieres to Declan’s name include works by Oliver Rudland, Toby Anderson, Oran Johnson, 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 the founder and director of the period ensemble Harmonicon, he champions the revival of 19th-century performance practice, and regularly curates intimate, salon-style performances in historic venues. He performs on a 19th-century 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 scholarly research into British musical life of the early 19th century. He is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where his work on musical annuals of the 1820s–50s is supervised by Prof. Laura Tunbridge. Naturally interested in guitar history, Declan is a member of the Cambridge Consortium for Guitar Research and an Assistant Editor of the journal Soundboard Scholar. He regularly gives papers at conferences in the UK and abroad, including twice at the Guitar Foundation of America. Declan is an experienced programme note writer, having written for festivals including Lake District Summer Music and the Barnes Music Festival.
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.
