York Early Music Festival marks 50 years with a fanfare for the city

York Early Music Festival celebrates its 50th edition this July with Beyond Borders, featuring nine days and 30+ concerts spread across the city's medieval churches, guildhalls, and the Minster. Since its founding in 1977 by a small group of early music enthusiasts, the festival has grown into one of the UK's leading events of its kind, drawing artists and audiences from across Europe and beyond.

Opening with Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers presented by I Fagiolini and closing with Solomon’s Knot in their extraordinary rendition of Bruhns’s St Mark Passion, internationally-acclaimed guests also include The Sixteen and B’Rock Orchestra & Vocal Consort. Monday 6 July offers a day of concerts commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of one of England’s most celebrated composers, John Dowland. Dowland Day invites audiences into his very particular world of music, poetry and melancholy with performances from Thomas Dunford, Rose Consort of Viols and Imago Mundi. Later in the week, mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston and tenor Paul Agnew move to the delicate world of French air de cour inspired by the poetry of love in A Gentle Air, accompanied by lutenist Sergio Bucheli.

To open the festival, the National Centre for Early Music (NCEM) has commissioned a new work: the York Fanfare, Flourish at 50, composed by Yorkshire-born composer Sam Meredith. Raised in Wakefield and a recent MA graduate from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Meredith was selected from a field of NCEM Young Composers Award alumni to write the piece. His work has previously been performed at the Barbican and the annual Bauhaus Festival in London.

Performing the fanfare is this year's Ensemble in Residence, [hanse]Pfeyffery, an all-female German Renaissance wind band playing shawms, cornetto, dulcian, slide trumpet and trombone. The ensemble specialises in improvised and rediscovered music from around 1500, and was the winner of the Cambridge Early Music Prize at the 2024 York International Young Artists Competition.

The fanfare will be performed outside the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall on Friday 3 July before I Fagiolini opens the festival and outside York Minster on Saturday 4 July ahead of The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage concert. [hanse]Pfeyffery can also be heard on The Early Music Show, broadcast live from the NCEM on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 5 July at 5pm.

Meredith describes the piece as balancing ‘the rousing and awe-inducing nature of a traditional fanfare' with 'a sense of playfulness, joy and celebration, more in the spirit of folk and dance music’ – a fitting description to celebrate 50 years of this major Early Music festival.

Explore the full line-up of this year's York Early Music Festival and book tickets on their Continuo Connect Festival page.