Claudio Abbado and Maurizio Pollini – two great veterans of the Italian classical music world – have each been honoured at the Royal Philharmonic Society awards.
Pollini won his award for the Pollini Project, a critically acclaimed series of piano recitals at the Southbank Centre in London. Abbado won the award for conductor for his extraordinary concerts with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, also at the Southbank Centre.
Another great pianist received the highest accolade of the Royal Philharmonic Society: Mitsuko Uchida, who was presented with the society's gold medal. At the awards ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel, London, the society saluted Uchida as "a peerless musician and a great humanist".
English National Opera was rewarded with best opera for Deborah Warner's detailed and poignant production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Toby Spence, who held audiences spellbound in that production as the doomed Lensky, took the award for best singer.
Cellist Oliver Coates, who plays with Aurora Orchestra among other ensembles, and is artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre, won the award for young artist, for his "diverse and passionate performances" and for drawing in "a new classical audience", according to the judges.
And Radio 3 "at its best" won the creative communication prize, seeing off Turner-prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, for its Hear and Now 50 series – a year-long project spotlighting 50 landmark pieces of music from the late-20th century. "From an excellent, challengingly diverse shortlist" the series was chosen "for dispelling, with such elegant brevity, the myths which have for too long isolated so many of the wonders of 20th-century music from wider appreciation".
Spitalfields Music in London was a double winner, taking the audiences and engagement prize for its scheme whereby patrons were invited to buy an extra ticket to donate to a first-time attender; and the learning and participation award for its community opera We Are Shadows.
Jonathan Harvey won the large-scale composition award for Messages, "a work of exceptional epic and spiritual quality", according to the judges.
The Royal Philharmonic Society was founded 299 years ago to "promote the performance ... of the best and most approved instrumental music". Its annual awards "mark the achievements of distinguished practitioners".
The winners in full:
Audiences and engagement: Spitalfields Music, Buy One, Donate One
Chamber music and song: Apartment House
Chamber-scale Composition: Sally Beamish: Reed Stanzas (String Quartet No 3)
Concert series and composition: Aldeburgh festival 2011
Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Creative communication: BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now 50
Ensemble: National Youth Choir of Scotland
Instrumentalist: Maurizio Pollini
Large-scale composition: Jonathan Harvey, Messages
Learning and participation: Spitalfields Music, We are Shadows
Opera: ENO Eugene Onegin
Young Artist: Oliver Coates
Gold medal: Mitsuko Uchida
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion