Sally Minter is a flute and piccolo player living in Manchester with her husband and their two children.  Before emigrating from South Africa to England in 2020, Sally was the subprincipal flute and piccolo of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.  Sally now freelances with some of the best orchestras in the North West of England.  She performs regularly with the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé Orchestras, as well as the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Orchestra of the Opera North, where she had a trial for the second flute/piccolo position.  Sally has also performed with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.  Most recently, Sally toured with the Sinfonia of London (John Wilson Orchestra) to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; to Beijing with the BBC Philharmonic and Bilbao with the Hallé.  She holds a Master of Art with merit from the Royal Academy of Music in London where she studied with renowned flautist Paul-Edmund Davies. 

 

Before moving to the UK, Sally was one of Cape Town’s most diverse flautists and performed regularly in various chamber ensembles, including her award-winning duo “Avanti” with pianist Coila-Leah Enderstein, who released their debut album "Avanti Live in Concert" in 2018.  As a concerto soloist, she has performed with every major orchestra in South Africa.  Sally also maintained a successful teaching studio, with several of her students winning high profile competitions; as well as having one of her students accepted at the Royal Northern College of Music.  On the competition circuit, Sally was the runner-up in South Africa’s most prestigious national competition for instrumentalists: the SAMRO Competition.  ​​

 

As a student of Bridget Rennie Salonen, Sally graduated with a Bachelor of Music Honours, awarded with distinction and in the first class from the University of Cape Town.  Her Honours dissertation was a thematic, harmonic and melodic analysis of the flute concerto by Jacques Ibert.  During her time at UCT, Sally was the recipient of the class medal for three consecutive years for obtaining the highest aggregate in her year, performed as principal flute and soloist in the UCT Symphony Orchestra, and performed an on-stage flute solo described as “beguiling” by the Cape Times in Cape Town Opera’s production of Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims.  She was also the winner of the Fine Music Radio Award after a sold-out public performance in the Baxter Concert Hall.

 

During her time at the Royal Academy of Music, Sally was lucky enough to perform under the baton of world-renowned conductors Marin Alsop and Semyon Bychkov, and receive lessons and masterclasses from top international flautists, including, among others, William Bennett, Emily Beynon and Gareth Davies.  With her studies generously supported by the Oppenheimer Memorial Foundation, Sally was a semi-finalist in the Orpheus Musician of the Year Competition and was awarded the highest accolade of “outstanding” in the Croydon Music Festival Concerto Competition, and also performed with the London Mahler Orchestra and the Orpheus Sinfonia.

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Sally’s life has always been filled with music.  From a young age she participated in ballet and theatre productions and took recorder, piano, flute and saxophone lessons.  At school, Sally received distinctions for all her final music exams and received the Trinity Exhibition Award for obtaining the highest result in the country for a grade 8 exam.

 

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For performance bookings or teaching consultations, please see the contact page.