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Jamie Savan - cornett

Jamie Savan has performed with many of the world’s leading period-instrument ensembles, including Concerto Palatino, Oltremontano, La Fenice, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, and Concerto Italiano to name but a few, and continues to be in great demand as a freelance player of the cornett, mute cornett, and the oft-neglected ‘lizard’ or tenor cornett. He joined HMSC in 2003, and has since been responsible for researching and directing a number of innovative new programmes for the group. Jamie’s main passion is in discovering previously unknown music in old manuscripts and original printed part-books, and in bringing it to life though the process of transcribing, editing, performing and recording – both with HMSC, and with The Gonzaga Band, of which he is founder and director.

Since graduating from Oxford University with a first class degree in Music in 1997, he has maintained an interest in academic research and scholarship, whilst developing an international performing career. In 2005, he completed a doctorate in historical performance practice at Birmingham University, and he continues to be active as a part-time teacher and lecturer in higher education. His most recent post was at the University of Hull, where he was responsible for teaching the MMus course in performance studies. Jamie also teaches the cornett at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and is a regular guest teacher on the Cantare et Sonare seminar in the Austrian Tyrol. Together with Adam Woolf he started the Newark International Early Music Course in 2005, which has since become a hugely successful annual event.

Jamie began his musical life as a trumpet player: as an undergraduate he studied with Michael Laird (the renowned pioneer of both the natural trumpet and cornett), and passed the ARCM diploma in trumpet performance with honours. He went on to specialise on the cornett as a postgraduate student of Jeremy West at the Royal College of Music in London, funded by a Leverhulme studentship, and with Bruce Dickey at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, funded by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust and the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund.

His playing has received considerable critical acclaim: one reviewer recently described him as like a ‘cross between the young Michael Palin and the late, lamented David Munrow… he plays with the verve, and obvious love of his instrument, of the latter; and in his own, gentle scholarly way… he showed the wit of the former’ (Music & Vision). A reviewer for the BBC Music Magazine had ‘rarely heard mellifluous swing to match cornettist Jamie Savan’s’, while the Telegraph, in an echo of Mersenne, described his ‘superb technique and truly singing tone’ as a ‘glorious ray of musical sunshine’.

Visit Jamie's personal website...