Jeffrey Crellin

Jeffrey Crellin is an Australian oboist, who was principal of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) from 1977 to 2021. He was also the founder and Artistic Director of Australia Pro Arte from 1990 to 2006, a Melbourne-based chamber orchestra that later changed its name to the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.

Jeffrey Crellin was born in Brisbane, Queensland, and first studied the oboe with Frank Lockwood at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music (also piano with Max Olding), In 1973 he was the overall winner of the ABC Instrumental and Vocal Competitions, after which he travelled to Europe to study, most significantly with Heinz Holliger in Germany for two years on a Churchill Fellowship. There he won first prize in the Freiburg Musikhochschule Oboe Competition.

There was a time when Crellin's career might have taken a very different turn: "I had plans to move careers to opera singing at one point in my late twenties. I had sung professionally as a boy soprano with the Australian Opera and with JC Williamsons in Her Majesty's Theatre Brisbane in 1967, singing the shepherd boy in Tosca and being one of the urchins in Oliver. I continued that interest studying singing in Adelaide and Germany, and commenced studies again with Dame Joan Hammond at the VCA in 1978. I was already principal oboe with the MSO at that time, so it would have been quite a shift had I ultimately pursued that course."

Crellin is married to Prudence Davis, principal flautist of the MSO, and they have two sons. Jeffrey's brother Keith Crellin is an accomplished violist who was a founding member of the Australian String Quartet.