CAMGuillaume Dufay, 1436
Matilda Lloyd's (Trinity 2014) Cambridge soundtrack
Winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year Brass Final was just the start for Matilda Lloyd, the ‘trumpeter extraordinaire’ who became a global superstar.
Blowing her own trumpet: how a ‘bit of fun’ turned into a lifelong passion Winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year Brass Final was just the start for Matilda Lloyd, the ‘trumpeter extraordinaire’ who became a global superstar.
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14 July 2026
When Matilda Lloyd (Trinity 2014) first picked up a trumpet, aged just eight, she had no idea that it would become anything but a bit of fun.
But winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year Brass Final – just a few months before she came up to Cambridge – made it clear that it was the beginning of something special. Lloyd did Music at Cambridge, but it could all have been so different.
“I really enjoyed school and academic work, so I contemplated doing a History degree instead,” she recalls. But her music course ended up providing the “best of both worlds” – a strong history of music component coupled with opportunities to perform.
And perform she did, playing everything from chamber music to pop. But she also found time for clubs like netball and archery – and made a strong group of non-musician friends she credits with keeping her grounded. Since graduating,
Lloyd has established herself as a force in classical music, winning multiple awards, recording an acclaimed discography with Chandos Records, and teaching at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Although the Covid years weren’t easy for a soloist at the start of her career – “my agency dissolved within weeks of the pandemic starting,” she recalls – this testing time clarified her focus, and spurred her on to fully commit to her chosen path.
Today Lloyd lives in Berlin, but travels all round the world to perform. She looks back at her time at Cambridge with great fondness. “I can’t express just how much I enjoyed those years,” she says.
“They gave me such a great foundation for my career, but also helped me discover myself as a person.”
"I have many great friends and collaborators from the Cambridge music scene, but I was also very lucky in that I found a wonderful group at Trinity who were mostly non-musicians. We’re all still best friends to this day. It was so grounding and refreshing to me to be able to go and have dinner in Hall every night and talk about things other than music."
Nuper Rosarum Flores
Guillaume Dufay, 1436
Before coming to Cambridge, I didn’t know much about the choral world. In my first year, we had a paper that traced the roots of western classical music through Europe, and polyphonic music really gripped me. It was a whole avenue of music I had never discovered before, and I would just lose myself for hours, looking at all the different types of notation from these beautiful manuscripts and transcribing them into modern notation. This particular piece is a wonderful example of early polyphony. It was written in 1436 for the grand opening ceremony of the cathedral in Florence, which I first visited when I was 10 years old. I can really imagine myself standing in that space and being astonished by the sounds.
Clean Bandit, 2014
A&E
Clean Bandit, 2014
The album New Eyes by Clean Bandit came out in my first year, and it became the soundtrack to my whole time at Cambridge. We’d dance along to the tracks in the clubs, but this one is memorable to me for a different reason. In our first year aural exams, they’d give us a string quartet with some parts missing, and we’d have to fill in the missing parts. I wasn’t particularly good at doing this in the trial runs, but in the exam, the piece just so happened to be the Bach chorale that opens this Clean Bandit song. Because I had heard it so many times, I wrote out the whole thing and got a really high mark. So this track saved me in my first year exams.
Canzon Cornetto
Canzon Cornetto
Samuel Scheidt, 1621
This is a piece for four trumpets which I played a lot with CUTE, the Cambridge University Trumpet Ensemble. We played it every May Week at the Singing from the Towers Concert in Trinity. The choir would be on the chapel tower, and we’d be on the opposite tower. We’d play some fanfare, and then they’d sing back at us, and everyone would be standing down in the Great Court watching. We also played it at honorary doctorate degrees at the Senate House. But the most notable occasion was a big fundraising event with Stephen Hawking there on stage with us. This was one of his last ever appearances, so it’s really memorable to me.
Gustav Mahler, 1896
Symphony No. 3, Third Movement
Gustav Mahler, 1896
I did so many orchestral concerts in my first two years, but as I headed into my third year I just wanted to knuckle down and focus on my studies. I remember saying to the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra: ‘Look, I can’t do all these concerts.’ But they said: ‘We’re going to do Mahler 3, please will you come and play the offstage post horn solo?’ So I made an exception. I climbed up into the organ loft of King’s College Chapel and performed with my flugelhorn from up there. It was amazing to peep down to the orchestra below, while the sound soared out on top of them.
Flook, 2005
The Road to Errogie
Flook, 2005
When I was revising for my finals, I couldn’t listen to classical music because I would find myself analysing it. I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics either, as it would distract me, and I hated studying in silence. So I ended up discovering this Irish folk band, Flook, who fuse traditional elements and bring it into the present day. You could pick any of their tracks from any of their albums and you’d have found it on my revision playlist. I found it very relaxing and soulful, and I could have it on in the background without drawing too much attention away from my studies.
Beauty and the Beast Alan Menken & Howard Ashman, 1991
Be Our Guest
Beauty and the Beast Alan Menken & Howard Ashman, 1991
In addition to all the classical ensembles, I played in a function band called Dysfunktional and the Cambridge University Pops Orchestra. These were some of the most fun concerts I ever performed in. Towards the end of my first year, we did a huge Beauty and the Beast themed concert at Trinity, with everyone dressed as a Disney or Pixar character. I dressed as Dory from Finding Nemo, with a blue dress and scales on my hands. The Be Our Guest tune was iconic. The arrangements were made for us by Simon Nathan, who is now an absolute superstar arranger. Every time I hear that opening with the accordion, I remember sitting up there in Trinity Chapel doing something that was so different from the orchestral trumpet world I’d grown up in, and just having so much fun.
Matilda Lloyd is a trumpet soloist and Professor of Trumpet at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London.
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