Busoni Composition Prize 2021

This year’s winners of the Busoni Composition Prize endowed by Aribert Reimann will be presented at a concert with laudations. Brazilian composer Igor Santos, who lives in the US and has won several awards, will receive the main prize. The two chamber-music works with will present his music show his special talent for creating correspondences with articulation, rhythm of speech and speech gesture as well as the human voice in a music that is rich in sound colour and technically sophisticated. Text fragments from Peter Handke’s Kaspar or the word “confined” as a metaphor for the restrictions of the Covid-19 era form starting points for the works performed. Patterns of repetition, sounds that swell and subside, the addition of everyday noises, electronics, microtonal inflections or resonances right up to the development of so-called meta-instruments as well as melodic gestures give rise to this musical richness, which is intended to have an empathetic effect on the listeners.

A world premiere composed for this occasion by the young composer and sponsorship award winner Elias Jurgschat will be performed. The work opens up fields of relationships and relations in which different and divergent, yet similar and related elements shape the togetherness.

Two Elegies (No. 1 and 6) from 1907 for solo piano by Ferruccio Busoni, eponym of the prize and long-time member of the Akademie der Künste, complete the chamber-music programme. The Elegies, published in the same year as his pioneering theoretical work Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Draft of a New Aesthetic of the Art of Sound), characterise a musical transformation felt by Busoni himself with expanded tonality and bitonal approaches, which he also expressed through the title of the first Elegy Nach der Wendung (After the Turn).
Berlin ensemble LUX:NM will perform.

Programme
Welcome
Laudations for the prizewinners

Ferruccio Busoni: Elegies, BV 249: No. 1 Nach der Wendung (1907) for piano
Igor Santos : confined.speak (2020, DE) for violin and piano
Elias Jurgschat: Neues Werk (2021, premiere) for trombone, violoncello, piano and percussion
Ferruccio Busoni: Elegies, BV 249: No. 6 Erscheinung (Notturno) (1907) for piano
Igor Santos: speak through speaking (2017, DE) for saxophone, accordion and double bass

Ensemble LUX:NM
Olga Holdorff (violin)
Zoé Cartier (violoncello)
Ruth Velten (saxophone)
Florian Juncker (trombone)
Silke Lange (accordion)
Vitaliy Kyianytsia (piano)
Lukas Böhm (percussion)
Martin Offik (sound direction)

Guest
Beltane Ruìz Molina (double bass)