Jordan Ashman, a percussionist, has won the BBC Young Musician competition. The 18-year-old from Cambridgeshire won the renowned award while performing Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto, which called for him to play the drums, marimba, vibraphone, and even the brake drum of a car.
His “emotional” performance, according to the chair of the judging panel Anna Lapwood, “made all of us catch our breath.”
Ashman joins past Young Musician Award winners Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, both cellists.
The Milton adolescent began playing the drums when he was seven years old and then moved on to symphonic percussion after helping his father construct a 3.5-octave xylophone.
They are extremely pricey, he said. Being an engineer, my father was somewhat like, “We’ll just make one.”
He presently attends the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and has performed with the National Children’s Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra, and National Youth Brass Band.
When his triumph was revealed, Ashman was speechless but still managed to congratulate his family and friends in the crowd.
He said to the host Jess Gillam, who was also a finalist in the 2016 Young Musician competition, that receiving support from home was “simply [amazing].
Ashman later admitted that participating in the competition had been “extremely scary” yet “very exhilarating” after gathering his thoughts.
He continued,
“I truly believe that it’s a tremendous opportunity to highlight what percussion can achieve. Many people believe that percussion is just used in the background and that it isn’t very versatile.
The performer defeated pianist Ethan Loch from Glasgow, who has been blind since birth, violist Jaren Ziegler, flautist Sofa Patterson-Gutiérrez, trumpeter Sasha Canter, and violinist Sofa Patterson-Gutiérrez.
Before moving on to the grand final at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, each performer won their category competitions.
The competition was shot on September 29 and the results were announced on Sunday night on BBC Radio Three and BBC Four.
According to Lapwood, head of music at Pembroke College in Cambridge, “all five finalists displayed a boldness and devotion to the brilliance that was moving.”
She continued by describing the winner: “Jordan Ashman’s performance started with beautiful, subtle beauty rather than loud, flamboyant playing.
“Throughout that delicate start, he held the entire crowd, and he maintained that magic throughout his entire performance. Jordan mixed emotional expressiveness with a simple, confident technique and flashes of brilliance that had us all gasping.
After Adrian Spillet in 1998, who is currently the principal percussionist of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and Fang Zhang, who won the 2020 competition in May of last year after the initial final was postponed due to the pandemic, Ashman is the only percussionist to have won the twice-yearly Young Musician competition.
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