[hanse]Pfeyfferey. Lakeside, Nottingham, O9 October 2025, 4✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Elam Rotem.

[hanse]Pfeyfferey.  Lakeside, Nottingham, O9 October 2025,

4✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

“[hanse]Pfeyfferey invite you to party like it’s 1525.”

One small disappointment with this concert by [hanse]Pfeyfferey is that the five women who make up this extraordinarily named Renaissance wind band didn’t explain what on earth the name means.  And this wasn’t the sort of concert in which you could nod off and miss important bits of information like that.  This was music fit for outdoor celebrations, tailor-made for playing from high church towers - and sure to be found at the very swishest of parties in early 16th century Germany.

In fact, the group invited their Lakeside audience to ‘party like it’s 1525’.  It’s fair to say that the Djanogly Recital Hall isn’t exactly designed for dancing, excessive drinking and generally letting one’s hair down.  However, you could use your imagination, especially when such vividly evocative sounds made the 500 year journey back in time so easy to enjoy.

These five performers are passionate about the music they play and the instruments they play it with.  One by one they introduced the audience to their instruments: the cornetto (like a recorder but played with a trumpet mouthpiece); the trombone (much like a modern one but much softer and more vocal in quality); the shawm (which makes a sound full of eastern promise and is an ancestor of the oboe); the dulcian (a species of bassoon) and the slide trumpet (which died out when more convenient valves were invented). 

All five instruments played together certainly pack a sonic punch, especially in a space designed for intimate chamber music.  But the energy of [hanse]Pfeyfferey is infectious and the ears quickly adjust to the robust volume levels.  Their programme looked impressively esoteric on paper: all sorts of reconstructions from rare, often incomplete, manuscripts, mostly by unknown composers but occasionally from names that ring only the most distant of distant bells.  The items were arranged in thematic groupings: ‘welcome drink’, ‘reflections of love’, ‘blossoming  romance’, ‘kitchen table philosophy’, ‘secrets and gossip’.  It was a clever way of making the culturally remote seem easy and familiar.

[hanse]Pfeyfferey’s five members endeared themselves to a large, enthusiastic Lakeside audience.  Their playing is expert, their communication skills superb and they do a splendid service in educating people about the musical world of our ancestors 500 years ago.  Their programme had so much to enjoy, even though it was sometimes hard to distinguish one piece from another, the melodies tending to have rather similar shapes and textures.  Still, it was an ear-opening concert and one that surely won many friends for [hanse]Pfeyfferey as well as for those groups of German town pipers who provided the musical backdrop to life so long ago. 

[hanse]Pfeyfferey:

Lilli Pätzold (cornetto), Alexandra Mikheeva (slide trumpet/trombone), Laura Dümpelmann (shawm, arrangements), Emily Saville (trombone), Melissa Sandel (dulcian)