Simon Höfele

Born in Darmstadt in 1994, Simon Höfele started playing the trumpet when he was seven and began his studies with Reinhold Friedrich in Karlsruhe at the age of fourteen. He received major distinctions early on, including the BBC New Generation Artist, Rising Star of the European Concert Hall Organization, and “Junger Wilder” at the Konzerthaus Dortmund. He has appeared as a soloist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, various BBC orchestras, the Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Konzert­hausorchester Berlin, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Recitals have taken him to London’s Wigmore Hall, Zurich’s Tonhalle, the Berlin and Vienna Konzerthaus, the Paris and Luxembourg Philharmonie, Brussels’s Bozar Hall, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and the Herkulessaal in Munich. He has also performed at the Schleswig-Holstein, Rheingau, Würzburg, and Grafenegg festivals. In addition to the classic trumpet repertoire by composers from Haydn to Jolivet, Simon Höfele is also enthusiastically dedicated to contemporary music. Miroslav Srnka, Konstantia Gourzi, Mark Simpson, Kaan Bulak, and Lisa Streich have written new works specifically for him; he also regularly performs compositions by Toshio Hosokawa, Matthias Pintscher, and Christian Jost. He received the German Record Critics’ Award in 2018 for his debut album Mysteries, and his release Standards, which features trumpet concertos by Haydn, Hummel, Arutjunjan, and Copland, was awarded the Opus Klassik in 2020. Most recently, in the spring of 2024, he released No Clouds in Haraz with Kaan Bulak as a tribute to distant regions and their shared love of coffee (Höfele also works as a barista). He is the host of the podcast Klassik Crush on WDR 3 and founder of the Kunstverlust Association, for which he portrays people who are committed to the preservation of art and culture as a photographer.

July 2024