York early music competition winners

[LeTromboniste]

[hanse]Pfeyfferey, an ensemble of Renaissance brass and reeds has today won the Cambridge Early Music Prize, one of four prizes of the International Young Artists Competition at the York Early Music Festival (which is one of the top early music competitions).

The ensemble members for this competition were
Lilli Pätzold, cornetto
Laura Dümpelmann, bombard
Alexandra Mikheeva, slide trumpet and trombone
Emily Saville, trombone

It is traditionally very tough for brass ensembles to win prizes at these sorts of events where they are competing with strings, woodwinds and voices, but they made a very strong impression and captured the audience and jury's attention as soon as they stepped into the hall.

This up-and-coming group is really worth checking out (they're quite active on their socials and website), and you can expect to hear about them again in coming years. They're already raising the bar for this style of playing both in terms of dedication to research and to a historical approach, and in terms of audience engagement. They do lots of outreach and innovative programming – they notably play in all kinds of environments, and just finished a year-long residency at a multidisciplinary arts center doing interactive projects with visual and digital artists.