Anna Disley-Simpson – charleshutchpress

The Gonzaga Band members Jamie Savan, Steven Devine and Faye Newton: Teaming up with National Centre for Early Music, York, and BBC Radio 3 for Young Composers Award 2026

THE deadline to register online entries for the National Centre for Early Music Young Composers Award 2026 in York is 12 noon on Friday, February 2 2026.

Launched on BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show, this annual award is presented by the NCEM in association with regular partners BBC Radio 3.

For the 2026 instalment, young composers will be working with The Gonzaga Band, specialists in late-Renaissance and early-Baroque repertoire.

The deadline for submission of scores will be Friday, March 2. Successful shortlisted candidates will be informed on Monday, March 1 and then be invited to attend the award day at the NCEM, St Margaret’s Church, Walmgate, York, on Thursday, April 16. The NCEM will meet reasonable travel and accommodation costs from within the UK.

Young composers are invited to compose a new song setting for soprano, cornett and keyboard, to be performed by Gonzaga Band musicians Jamie Savan, cornett, Faye Newton, soprano, and Steven Devine, keyboards, who are renowned for innovative programming, underpinned by cutting-edge research.

The song should take inspiration from the experimental and innovative music of Claudio Monteverdi and his contemporaries, evoked in The Gonzaga Band’s recital programme Love’s Labyrinth, released as a recording on the Deux-Elles Classical Recording label in July 2025.

On this album, The Gonzaga Band navigate a path between the ardour and anguish of love, from the most exquisitely wrought madrigals of Monteverdi to the lively and sensuous dance rhythms of popular canzonettas.

Owain Park, right: Former winner of NCEM Young Composers Award, now director of the BBC Singers and The Gesualdo Six

In the process, they explore the development of a new style in Italian composition and performance practice, through which musicians were striving to find new ways of expressing and heightening the emotional power of their poetic texts.

Their distinctive arrangements, drawn from sources connected to the ducal court of Ferrara as well as Venice and Florence, heighten the intimate connection between the cornett and the human voice, interweaving in duet.

Award candidates should write a song setting that explores the theme of love through the relationship between the voice and instruments, setting a poem by Lady Mary Wrath, a contemporary of Shakespeare.

Composers selected for the final are invited to a collaborative workshop day in York on April 16 2026, led by composer Christopher Fox and Gonzaga Band members. This will be followed by a public performance of all the selected compositions at the NCEM.

The winning entries will be premiered by The Gonzaga Band in a lunchtime concert at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on Tuesday, October 27 2026, to be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show and BBC Sounds.

This major national annual award is open to young composers up to the age of 25 resident in the UK and is divided into two categories: age 18 and under and age 19 to 25.

NCEM director Dr Delma Tomlin says: “The Young Composers Award is one of the annual highlights at the NCEM, and we always enjoy welcoming and nurturing the extraordinary array of talent these young composers have to offer.

Anna Disley-Simpson: Alumna of NCEM Young Composers Award

“Alumni of the award include: Owain Park, now director of BBC Singers and The Gesualdo Six; Sarah Cattley; Kristina Arakelyen; Kerensa Briggs and Anna Disley-Simpson, whose new work was performed last year as part of the York Early Music Festival.

“The award truly makes a difference to young composers’ career paths – it has proved to be an important stepping stone in the careers of these young people. We are very proud of our success to date and look forward to welcoming composers from across the UK to join with us in partnership with The Gonzaga Band.”

Les Pratt, producer of BBC Radio 3’s The Early Music Show, says: “We’re delighted to continue to support this award here at BBC Radio 3, now looking ahead to its 19th edition. It’s hugely important to challenge and nurture young talent, and what’s most gratifying is seeing past winners and entrants who are now making their way in the professional world.

“We are really looking forward to sharing next year’s compositions for The Gonzaga Band with our audiences at home on The Early Music Show.”

Jamie Savan, of The Gonzaga Band, enthuses: “We’re excited to collaborate with the NCEM and BBC Radio 3 on the Young Composers Award for 2026. We’re passionate about expanding the contemporary repertoire for cornett (the most ‘vocal’ of instruments), together with soprano voice and historical keyboards, and we can’t wait to work with the next generation of composers on this project.”

Terms and conditions and details of how to take part in the NCEM Young Composers Award 2025 are available at: https://www.youngcomposersaward.co.uk or by emailing info.composers@ncem.co.uk.

The Gonzaga Band: back story

The Gonzaga Band’s Faye Newton, Jamie Savan, centre, and Steve Devine

FORMED by cornettist Jamie Savan in 1997 with a mission to explore the intimate relationship between vocal and instrumental performance practice in the Early Modern period.

The ensemble takes its name from the ducal family of Mantua: the Gonzagas were powerful and influential patrons of the arts in the late Renaissance, who employed Claudio Monteverdi as their maestro della musica at the turn of the 17th century.

Monteverdi wrote some of his most innovative music for the Gonzagas: his third, fourth and fifth books of madrigals, the operas Orfeo and Arianna and the Vespers of 1610.

Performing most often as a chamber ensemble with a core of soprano voice, cornett and keyboards, and expanding on occasion according to the particular requirements of each programme, The Gonzaga Band can perform in a variety of combinations, ranging from a trio to a full period-instrument orchestra and vocal consort.

The Gonzaga Band is renowned for its innovative programming, underpinned by cutting-edge research, shining new light on the repertoire and its interpretation.

The band has five internationally acclaimed recordings to its credit, including Sacred Garland on Chandos/Chaconne and Venice 1629 on the Resonus Classics label. Its latest release is Love’s Labyrinth on the Deux-Elles label (2025). For more information, visit www.gonzagaband.com.

Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston: Going to Heaven or Hell at York Early Music Festival. Picture: Julien Gazeau

HEAVEN & Hell will be the theme of the 2025 York Early Music Festival, a summer fiesta of 19 concerts in eight days featuring international artists from tomorrow.

The Sixteen, the Tallis Scholars and Academy of Ancient Music will be taking part, as will French orchestral ensemble Le Consort, led by rising-star violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, in their York debut with an “exceptional rendition of exceptional of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – but not quite as you know it”.

The festival will intertwine three very different themes: firstly, the music of Renaissance composer Orlando Gibbons, opening with viol consort Fretwork and mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston’s My Days: Songs and Fantasias programme tomorrow at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, at 7.30pm.

Secondly, the genius of the Baroque, focusing on Bach and Vivaldi, not least the aforementioned Le Consort performance of The Four Seasons on Sunday at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at 7.30pm, when Lifetime Achievement Award 2025 recipient Catherine Bott will be the reader.

Thirdly, the strand that lends itself to the 2025 title: a reflection on Man’s fall from grace – from Heaven to Hell – in biblical times with YEMF artistic advisor and BBC New Generation artist Helen Charlston and her fellow Gramophone Award-winner, lutenist and theorbo player Toby Carr, who team up in the medieval Guildhall of the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall on July 9 from 6.30pm to 9.45pm.

“I feel very lucky to have such a bond with the York Early Music Festival,” says Helen, who was a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying music there from 2011 to 2014. “It’s a special festival and it feels like a special connection as I’ve been coming up for many years.

“My early memories of the festival are of doing a few years’ concerts with David Skinner’s vocal consort Alamire. I’ve also sung with the Yorkshire Bach Choir, after Peter Seymour was given my name and I helped him out for a concert at short notice, and as so often that led to a fruitful partnership.”

Fretwork: Performing My Days: Songs and Fantasiaswith Helen Charlston at Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York tomorrow

Helen is in the third year of her role as festival artistic advisor. “I was very honoured to be asked and it’s a lovely way to connect with music-making around the country. I don’t run the festival but I do really love music and thinking about what audiences might like to hear that they haven’t,” she says.

“I can flex my festival muscle thinking about that and it gives me the chance to suggest who could be invited to take part in the festival. For example, this year Le Consort are coming over from France. I know their work from a group called Les Arts Florissants, a French baroque ensemble who I’ve done a young artists’ projects with in Paris. I’ve got to know a few of their players and a few of them will be appearing with Le Consort.”

Festivals are the “perfect launch-pad for collaborations”, says Helen, whose July 9 programme is a case in point. In an open call for the York Early Music Festival Special Commission, NCEM Young Composers Award alumni were invited to respond to the Heaven & Hell theme by writing a piece to be performed by Charlston and Carr as part of their In Heaven & Hell…Yours To Choose programme featuring Purcell, Strozzi, Monteverdi, Charpentier and Humfrey works.

Anna Disley-Simpson has been awarded the commission from a competitive field of 24 applications for her piece Heaven Or Hell, for which she collaborated with librettist Olivia Bell, drawing inspiration from Kurt Weill for a composition that Anna promises will be “deliberately subversive and unexpected in several ways”.

Supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation and an anonymous donor, Dorset-born, London-based Anna has received a commission fee of £2,000, plus travel and accommodation expenses within the United Kingdom to attend a workshop with the musicians in London and the York premiere.

“Toby and I are doing a programme about heaven and hell after Delma [festival director Delma Tomlin] and I were having a conversation about the York Mystery Plays and it sparked my interest in the idea of York being a place for the retelling of very graphic stories,” says Helen.

“Delma is the governor of the Merchant Adventurers, who sponsor the Last Judgement in Mystery Play productions, and my initial idea began to spiral into thinking about how a lot of 17th century music is about heaven and hell. Toby and I decided we wanted to look at performing religious music by composers whose secular works we’ve shared with the festival audience.”

Composer Anna Disley-Simpson

Those works will be complemented by Disley-Simpson’s commission. “We had a whole heap of wonderful ideas put to us by applicants from the Young Composers scheme and had a lovely day chatting with eight composers before we selected Anna,” says Helen.

“Anna’s piece is wonderful: a monologue with a second character welcoming you to purgatory, where you have to decide which route you will take, to heaven or hell. I think it’s got something about it that the audience will not quite expect!

“I hope other people will take her work up as a song as I always want to encourage others to perform works to see how they develop when I’ve commissioned a piece.”

In further highlights, The Tallis Scholars present Glorious Creatures at York Minster on Saturday, 7.30pm; The Sixteen perform Angel Of Peace at York Minster, July 7, 7.30pm, and the Spanish ensemble Cantoria present A La Fiesta!, a sizzling array of ensaladas and villancicos, at St Lawrence Church on July 8, 7pm (sold out).

Swiss-based medievalists Sollazzo return to York for the first time since winning a prestigious Diapason d’Or award to present The Angels Are Singing at the NCEM on July 10, 7pm.

The festival will finish with a flourish in the company of the Academy of Ancient Music and their leader, violinist Bojan Čičić in a celebration of Bach’s violin concertos at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall on July 11, 7pm.

The full programme and booking details can be found at ncem.co.uk/whats-on/yemf/. Bookings also can be made on 01904 658338, via boxoffice@ncem.co.uk and in person at the NCEM, Margaret’s Church, Walmgate, York.

Violinist Bojan Čičić: Leading the Academy of Ancient Music in a celebration of Bach’s violin concertos at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall on July 11

Tag: Anna Disley-Simpson

National Centre for Early Music and BBC Radio 3 launches 2026 edition of Young Composers Award with The Gonzaga Band

The Gonzaga Band: back story

York Early Music Festival 2025 is ready to go to Heaven or Hell from tomorrow