Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2026
Trumpeter
When Sebastian Deleurang’s family moved from Frederiksberg to West Zealand, his father found a hunting horn in Netto for 300 kroner. He thought it was amusing, now that they lived in the countryside, and brought it home. Sebastian was the only one in the family who could get a sound out of it. The others blew in vain, but with the little boy, tones came out straight away.
A few weeks later, Sebastian’s mother – herself a pianist – asked him and his older sister what they would like to play at the local music school. His sister said drums. Sebastian said trumpet, the only instrument he could think of, inspired by the hunting horn on the shelf.
When Sebastian applied for the talent programme at the music school in Kalundborg after a couple of years, he was not admitted. Instead, he applied to Tivoli-Garden, which his father thought was an excellent idea. They initially wanted him to play saxophone there, but his parents said no, since there are no jobs in classical saxophone. So Sebastian waited a year, applied again, and was admitted on cornet.
At Tivoli-Garden, Sebastian was sent home with the trumpet bible: Jean-Baptiste Arban’s legendary 400-page method for trumpet and cornet technique. After lessons he would go home and play his way through as much as he could until the instrument would give no more, and then he would go to bed. His mother had said that practising in the evening was a good idea, because then the brain keeps working while you sleep.
From Tivoli-Garden, the path led on to pre-college training and Sankt Annae Gymnasium, and from there to the Royal Danish Academy of Music. But in his first year at the conservatoire, Sebastian developed severe headaches, which he thought were caused by a problem with his wind technique. It turned out to be a serious infection in the root of a front tooth. At the same time, he had long dreamed of doing his military service in the Royal Life Guards, so he took leave, completed his service, and even learned to play the flute in the Guards’ drum and fife corps.
When Sebastian returned to the trumpet after his military service and began working as a freelance musician, he discovered something crucial. At the conservatoire he had become used to a critical mindset in which one was never really told that what one did was good enough. The first time he assisted in the Prince’s Band, he did not trust himself to play even the simplest notes. A colleague put it plainly: he had never heard anyone play so many hours without running flat. “When I got it into my mindset that I needed more self-confidence, something completely wild happened to my playing,” Sebastian says. “It was not a physical development, but a mental one.”
When Sebastian has to explain why he plays music, he returns to a conversation with his mother: “The closest thing to magic that I experience in the real world is when I play music. You cannot wave a wand and lift a chair, but you can play something that moves people and moves yourself and your colleagues. Things happen that you cannot explain and cannot recreate with machines.”
Since then, Sebastian has won a position in the Prince’s Band and is active as a freelance musician with, among others, the DR Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Danish Orchestra. In 2025 he took part in the prestigious ARD International Trumpet Competition in Munich, probably as the first Danish trumpeter in twenty years. The hunting horn from Netto still stands on the shelf at home. Sebastian takes it down once a year and looks at it. One day it will be framed and hung on the wall, with a small note saying that this was where the very first notes came out.
