Innovation Award
Thursday 16 May 2024, 8:00 pm Colosseum Entrance, Schönhauser Allee
About the Award
The Classical:NEXT Innovation Award raises awareness of forward-thinking projects taking place around the world, as nominated by the dedicated Nominating Committee, consiting mainly of renowned international journalists. Their role is to inform classical music professionals about potential recipients outside of their own national or professional periphery. Nominations from the Committee form the initial Longlist, from which they select the final 10 nominations for the Shortlist. The Award recipients will then be selected by an online vote of all registered Classical:NEXT delegates.
Nominating Committee
The Nominating Committee consists of:
Harriet Cunningham (Australia), Romina de la Sotta (Chile), Jessica Duchen (United Kingdom), Lorena Jiménez Alonso (Spain), David Kettle (United Kingdom), Gianluigi Mattietti (Italy), Mauricio Peña Cediel (Colombia), René Solís Brun (Mexico), Brian Wise (United States), Ken Smith (China).
Industry Expert: Steve Long (United Kingdom).
Longlist Innovation Award
*matik-matik*, Colombia
*matik-matik* is an independent cultural space in Bogota (Colombia). Started in 2008, since it was founded it has worked incessantly towards furthering new music projects as well as sound explorations – all in an environment where coffee, drinks, partnership and conversation blend together. *matik-matik* hosts almost daily events that feature electr-acoustic, experimental, or contemporary music, free jazz, imporovisations, folklore, perfomance art, as well as screenings of shorts and documentaries.
The Sound Voice Project, United Kingdom
A remarkable project that seeks to connect with people who have lost or are losing the use of their voices due to medical illnesses such as laryngeal cancer, Motor Neurone Disease and Parkinson’s Disease, bringing together unique interdisciplinary collaborations with professionals in healthcare, biomedical research and technology. Led by composer Hannah Conway, working with librettist Hazel Gould, The Sound Voice Project platforms voices and narratives rarely given the stage. An immersive opera-video installation and live concert performed by people who have experienced voice loss, appearing together on stage with the professional singers, who include Roderick Williams, Lucy Crowe and Gweneth Ann Rand was shown at Kings Place and the Aldeburgh Festival last year and the project continues to develop, with the new immersive sound installation 100 VOICES touring public spaces and hospitals in 2024.
Modena Belcanto Festival, Italy
Modena Belcanto Festival is a new festival that takes up the legacy left in Modena by great opera singers such as Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni, but wants to interpret them in contemporary forms and styles. The synergy between the city’s various musical institutions, starting with the Pavarotti-Freni Municipal Theatre, has led to the creation of a programme where musical production (with the staging of Bellini’s opera I Puritani) and the education of young singers merge with diverse cultural proposals ranging from early music to electronics, from cinema to pop music.
Expedition Concerts at the Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany
The “Expeditions Concerts” at the Konzerthaus Berlin is a new format introduced by Joana Mallwitz in her first season in charge of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, in which she presents a detailed illustrated introduction to great masterpieces like Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 ‘Italian’ or Stravinsky’s ‘Le sacre du printemps’ with music examples at the piano to place the work in the composer’s context before conducting the entire work with the Konzerthausorchester.
km0 - Ibermúsica, Spain
km0 is a new concert series at Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional organised by Spanish leading concert promoter Fundación Ibermúsica. The four recitals of the concert series, featuring Spanish artists, take place at the Chamber Music Hall. During the one-hour recital, the artists explain the works and the public can also chat with them after the concert at the lobby of the concert hall. Also, all the concert programmes of these recitals have a focus on Women composers and Spanish living composers, including the premiere of new works commissioned by Ibermúsica. Albert Guinovart (piano), Laura Verdugo del Rey (guitar), Silvia Márquez (clavicembalo) and María Zubimendi (accordion) are the artists featured in this season.
The Catalyst Quartet, United States
The Catalyst Quartet has emerged as one of the most forward-looking chamber groups in the U.S. Its “Uncovered” project is a multi-volume set of albums devoted to historically underrepresented composers, among them, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and William Grant Still (the set’s third volume was nominated for a 2024 Grammy Award). In its residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the quartet collaborates with all kinds of visual artists in the galleries, rethinking the concert experience. And recognizing the value of brevity in the digital age, the Catalyst commissioned 11 miniature (1-2 minute) string quartets by noted composers for its “CQ Minute” project.
Serenade, United Kingdom
Serenade empowers artists to create enhanced digital music experiences, which bring fans closer to the artists and albums they love. Powered by blockchain technology, their Digital Pressing is a limited edition music format that is chart accredited in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, allowing artists to share extra bonus content (from track commentaries to unreleased recordings to BTS footage and photos) with their most engaged fans without the complicated overheads of producing more physical.
Popins, United States
In March 2024 Popins took its volumetric video studio to London to turn dozens of artists from diverse genres into 3D holograms. Several artists from Signum Records and the London Symphony Orchestra, including violinist Maxine Kwok, were filmed introducing themselves, performing, and telling stories about their instruments and favorite pieces. Maxine’s hologram can be conjured by fans anywhere in the world today on their smartphone by scanning the provided QR code. Popins 3D Media Kit provides artists and labels a turnkey solution for the creation and distribution of spatial assets that can be used for captivating announcements and music videos that stand out.
Extension Department of the Usach, Chile
The Extension Department of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Usach) is in charge of designing a rich cultural program whose heart is in art music. They have an annual season with 50 free concerts, with an average of 360 attendees per concert and an audience growth rate of 5.9%. This university does not teach composition or musical performance, but it has five stable professional casts: three choirs, one of the oldest early music ensembles in the country, with 45 years of experience (Syntagma Musicum), and the orchestra that performs the most premieres of Chilean contemporary music in the country (Orquesta Usach), which is 41 years old.
In addition to free concerts in their hall, which is the one with the best natural acoustics in the city (Aula Magna Usach), they offer free concerts in the most deprived and peripheral sectors of a city with more than 5,600,000 inhabitants that is characterized by territorial inequality.
They perform all repertoires, from the Renaissance to contemporary music: they offered, for example, the premiere in modern times of the zarzuela “Destinos vencen finezas” (1698) by Juan de Navas, and now they offer the world premiere of “Despedida”, a symphonic choral work by Miguel Farías, today the Chilean composer of greatest global significance, whose works have recently been premiered by Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic and San Diego Symphony. They also have a label that has published 23 albums of Chilean classical music in four years, and three radio shows.
Gateways Music Festival, United States
Founded in 1993, the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra brings together professional classical musicians of African descent from across the North America, providing a sense of community for participants while helping to mentor and inspire younger generations of black musicians. Though long based at the Eastman School of Music in upstate New York, it has a rapidly growing national presence, with performances this season at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington and Chicago’s Symphony Center. Its touring programmes are fresh and engaging, whether performing Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale alongside Wynton Marsalis’ A Fiddler’s Tale or juxtaposing a world premiere by Jon Batiste with works by Florence Price and Johannes Brahms.
NOEMA (Garden of Repose —a Multimedia Choral Concert), Hong Kong, PR China
Formed during the Covid pandemic, when choral singing was treated as a public health hazard, NOEMA (from classical Greek for “the content of thought”) became Hong Kong’s first fully professional vocal ensemble, formed to “raise the quality and perception of choral singing in Asia.” Their sixth production, Garden of Repose, embodies their approach, revealing both superb musical quality and programatic savvy in ripping the Requiem mass from either liturgical and concert settings to reimagine the Catholic ritual (using both Latin and vernacular text-settings by modern and living composers) as a theatricalized, immersive installation, where both performers and audience members move through space (with innovative lighting and sculptural set pieces) musically tracing the emotional arc of grief. The project is presented by the 52nd Hong Kong Arts Festival.
CEPROMUSIC, Mexico
Founded in 2012, the Center for Experimentation and Production of Contemporary Music (Cepromusic) is Mexico’s leading new music ensemble and a publicly funded programme that brings together artistic and academic activities to support the creation and promotion of contemporary music. In addition to its regular seasons at the Palace of Fine Arts, the CEPROMUSIC ensemble has made eight international tours to Germany, Colombia, Scotland, Spain, England, Brazil and three to the United States, with great critical and public success, as well as artistic and academic residencies in Colombia, Spain, the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom. In 2018, its career was recognised with an invitation to the Darmstadt Summer Festival. The ensemble’s repertoire seeks to evoke the broadest aspect of the current scene: from new complexity to improvisation, or from macro-timbral to real-time code.
sound festival, Aberdeen, United Kingdom
Week-long new music festival taking place in October in and around Aberdeen, bringing high-profile performers and composers to the city, involving many local venues and organisations, and providing support to emerging composers through formal projects, informal chats and networking
Veronique Serret, Australia
Véronique is one of those musicians who has in the past been the epitome of a ‘musician’s musician’. She plays, everywhere, everything – on stage with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, in recording studios, in stadiums with international artists touring, while also facilitating, conducting, fixing, making things happen, always professional, always brilliant. Now she has begun to release and perform and tour with her own music, the product of years of play underpinned by a rigorous classical training. It’s a wonderful model of what a musician can be.
Operah 2024 (Social Opera) - Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini di Jesi, Italy
The “Social Opera” project seeks to relate opera to the social: the latter adjective evokes a sensibility directed towards the world of education, training and the construction of pathways for the inclusion of disabled people. Starting from its own mission, the Pergolesi Spontini Foundation is activating, for the thirteenth consecutive year, the Social Theatre and Dance Movement Therapy course called “OperaH”. The idea is to bring opera to those who have little or no opportunity to experience it, and thus to make an unusual audience aware of the artistic value of opera and theatrical dramaturgy in general; to promote and communicate theatre not as a place closed off and reserved for an elite, but as a place of participation, of free self-expression, a space for wellbeing and growth that encourages processes of inclusion and enrichment for the whole community.
Floods of Fire, Australia
Floods of Fire celebrates the creativity and stories of the people living in South Australia and finds a collective voice to confront one of the most significant challenges we all face today: climate change. It marks one of the largest collaborations in South Australia’s history between citizens, artists, scientists, communities and partner organisations.
Since 2021, ASO has worked with a number of partners and community groups through workshops and rehearsals to create music with the ASO. Music from Floods of Fire was performed as part of Festival of Orchestra, and was part of the opening night of the Adelaide Festival in 2023.
Conceived and directed by Airan Berg, Floods of Fire is led by Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, presented in collaboration with Adelaide Festival, The University of Adelaide in celebration of their 150th anniversary, and over 100 South Australian partner organisations.
In 2024, Floods of Fire was presented as three chapters during the closing of the Adelaide Festival.
