Biography

Anna graduated from the Royal Academy of Music with an MMus(Distinction) in 2016, having won the Dennis Brain Horn Prize and studied with Martin Owen, Katy Woolley, Michael Thompson, Richard Watkins and Roger Montgomery. She completed her bachelors at the Royal College of Music in 2014 with first class honours, having won the Richard III Prize and been an RCM Concerto Competition finalist in her final year. There, she studied the modern horn with Tim Jones, Jeff Bryant, Simon Rayner, John Ryan and Julian Baker, and the hand horn with Sue Dent and Roger Montgomery. As a student, she toured with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the European Union Youth Orchestra; she also auditioned successfully for a number of training schemes with UK orchestras, including the Academy of Ancient Music’s AAMplify Orchestra, LSO Brass Academy and playing guest principal horn with the LPO Future Firsts Ensemble. She now works as the 2nd horn at Scottish Opera, combining her career there with a busy freelance schedule.

Combining principal horn, high horn and low horn work on both modern and historical horns, she has been on trial with Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and BBC Philharmonic. For the past few years, she has been the principal horn with English Touring Opera, receiving recent critical acclaim for performances of Bellini’s “I Capuleti e I Montecchi”, with reviewers lauding “the sheer quality of the musical performances…complemented by some instrumental solos that were very fine indeed, notably the horn solo for Giulietta’s opening aria “. She has also played with UK orchestras including Britten Sinfonia, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Welsh National Opera, London Mozart Players and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She has performed Brandenburg 1 several times with leading UK baroque ensemble Florilegium, and has recorded the work for a forthcoming CD alongside Anneke Scott with the collective Solomon’s Knot.

Early music forms a significant part of Anna’s work life. She has worked as a guest principal for Academy of Ancient Music, Oxford Bach Soloists and Capella Cracoviensis in Poland, as well as in the horn section for Dunedin Consort, The English Concert and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. A review of her Giulio Cesare with Irish Baroque Orchestra noted the “excellent obbligato players, including the fearlessly ornamenting horn-player Anna Drysdale”.

Anna is passionate about solo and chamber repertoire. She has performed a complete cycle of Mozart Horn Concertos on the natural horn with the Amadè Players, and Mozart 3 and Strauss’s 1st Horn Concerto with both orchestras at Harrow Young Musicians, the organisation that originally kindled her love of music. She also performed Ethel Smyth’s Concerto for Horn, Violin and Orchestra in 2018. On the modern horn, she was the 2015 winner of the Paxman Prize; 2015 also saw her first appearance at the British Horn Society’s annual meeting in Liverpool as a featured soloist. She is a regular guest with the Tailleferre Ensemble and with period wind sextet Boxwood and Brass.

Anna also appears frequently on the jazz scene, having held the horn chair for several years with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and appearing with them in settings such as the BBC Proms. She has played for Mark Lockheart’s “Days on Earth” project and appears on his album, “Smiling”, for bebop projects with Allison Neale, and with American saxophonist Sly5thAve at London’s Jazz Cafe; she has also headlined at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club with the Richard Shepherd Nonet, playing the music of Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool. She appears on saxophone player Tom Ridout’s album No Excuses, plays with the Steve Fishwick Nonet and Josephine Davies’s Enso Ensemble, has sold out Pizza Express Jazz Club multiple times with Billy Marrows’s Grande Familia and has performed several times at the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Anna received generous support throughout her studies from the Royal Academy of Music, Help Musicians UK, the Kathleen Trust, the Yorkshire Ladies’ Council of Education, the Women’s Careers Foundation and the Peter Hinckley Trust. To support her development as a historical horn specialist, after her masters degree the Countess of Munster Trust and Help Musicians UK continued to support her in travelling to Amsterdam to study with Teunis van der Zwart. Her Jungwirth Lausmann natural horn was purchased with the help of the Wolfson Foundation, the Macfarlane Walker Trust and the EMI Music Sound Foundation – support for which she is hugely grateful.