Phantasm, an award-winning consort of viols, was founded in 1994 by Laurence Dreyfus and has become recognized as the most exciting viol consort active on the world scene today. The ensemble catapulted into international prominence when its debut recording of works by Henry Purcell won a Gramophone Award for the Best Baroque Instrumental Recording of 1997. It has since won two further Gramophone Awards, for Orlando Gibbons in 2004 and John Dowland’s Lachrimae in 2017.

The consort has travelled the world over, performing in Prague, Tokyo, Istanbul, Helsinki and Washington DC. Other engagements have included the Trigonale Festival in Austria, Barcelona Early Music Festival, Bergen International Festival, Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music in London, Mazovia goes Baroque in Warsaw, Stockholm Early Music Festival, London’s Wigmore Hall, Brussels’ Palais des Beaux-Arts and Ghent’s De Bijloke.

Phantasm’s recordings have garnered steady praise with critics singling out their ‘intensity and homogeneity of tone’ and their ‘acuity to the music’s ever-active emotional flux’. The ensemble was awarded a Diapason d’or de l’année for Dowland’s Lachrimae (2017) and a Diapason d’or for Byrd’s Complete Consort Music (2011).

Phantasm was consort-in-residence at the University of Oxford and Magdalen College from 2005 to 2015. In 2015 the ensemble’s base of artistic activities moved to Berlin where members from the UK, the USA, Finland, and Germany assemble to rehearse and record new repertoire.