Simon Höfele

Trumpeter Simon Höfele opens this season’s ECHO series – the Barbican’s Europe-wide showcase for rising stars - with a dazzling flourish. “What Simon Höfele does with his trumpet is simply sensational!” wrote one critic when this young German trumpeter released his debut album Mysteries in 2018, and as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2017 to 2019, we’re sure to be hearing lots more of Höfele’s fearless, thrillingly expressive playing. His programme today features one of the highlights of that recording – Ligeti’s astonishing Mysteries of the Macabre – as well as a specially commissioned new work by Miroslav Srnka. But Höfele is an artist who doesn’t acknowledge stylistic boundaries, and Enescu’s Légende plus a whole string of Gershwin transcriptions will show him at his most beguiling – as well as his most brilliant.