After winning the first prize at the National Conservatory of the Paris Region in Jean-Claude Jaboulay’s lecture in 1996, Fabien Thouand studied with Jacques Tys and Jean-Louis Capazzali at the Higher National Conservatory of Music in Paris, where he unanimously won the first prize in the year 2000. In 2001 he enrolled in Professor Maurice Bourgue’s improvement lessons, obtaining in that same year the second prize at the Prague International Spring Competition and the third prize at the International Competition José Tomassini de Petritolio. In May 2002 he won the third prize at the Toulon International Wind Instrument Competition.
His career was developed initially in France but later throughout Europe, playing with different orchestras and chamber groups, being the first oboe of the Orchestra of the Theater de la Monnaie in Brussels, the Lyon Opera, the Bamberger Symphoniker, the Camerata de Salzburg, the Bayerischen Rundfunk Orchester, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2004 he won the place of first oboe in the Orquesta de la Scala in Milan, and he still maintains it.
He has played under the baton of internationally renowned conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Yuri Termikanov, Kurt Masur, Charles Dutoit and Valery Gergiev, among others.
After becoming the assistant to Jean-Louis Capezzali and Gérome Guichard at the Higher National Conservatory of Music in Lyon, he became the oboe teacher at the Lugano Conservatory and the Royal College of Music in London.