Nominations are in for 2024’s ICMA Awards
15/11/2023
The International Classical Music Awards today announced the nominations for their 2024 Awards, featuring many of our artists. The winners of the prestigious ICMA Awards will be revealed on 18 January 2024. The Award Ceremony and Gala concert will take place at the Palau de la Musica in Valencia on 12 April 2024.
Cellist Alban Gerhardt is nominated in the Chamber Music category for his latest album, Phantasy in Blue, an eclectic mix of collaborations with Alliage Quintett for solo cello and saxophone quintet. Praised as “a real novelty” and for its “vast amounts of cellistic wizardry”, Gerhardt continues to surprise and delight listeners with his immense talent and insatiable artistic curiosity.
Violist Timothy Ridout rings the bell once again with a nomination in the Concerto category for his “magisterial” Elgar • Bloch, having recently won the 2023 Gramophone Award for Concerto for the same recording. The album has been well received both for its exploration of previously little-known viola repertoire as well as Ridout’s “immaculately executed solo playing.”
In the category of Opera, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Chief Conductor Gustavo Gimeno have been nominated, with Harmonia Mundi’s release of Puccini Messa di Gloria & Orchestral Works with C. Castronovo, L. Tézier and Orfeó Català
In the category Baroque Instrumental, Víkingur Ólafsson’s latest Deutsche Grammophon release of Bach’s Goldberg Variations has been nominated. Ólafsson dedicates his next season to a Goldberg Variations world tour, performing the work across six continents throughout the year.
The Compositrices album, which includes some chamber music pieces featuring cellist Victor Julien-Laferrière, is nominated in the Associated Programmes category. The album, released by the Bru Zane label, explores the music of French female composers, including some piano and cello pieces by Henriette Renié, Mel Bonis and Nadia Boulanger.
Beethoven: Violin Sonatas with Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Midori was released digitally November 2022 and physically January 2023 by Warner Classics and explores Beethoven’s full cycle of sonatas in this form. The release highlights the mastery of the artist’s exploration of the sonata in the classical idiom and deeply connected musicianship. The release has received outstanding reviews across the board and is now nominated for an ICMA Award in the Chamber Music catergory.
“Midori and Jean-Yves Thibaudet have been friends for years, but this is their first album together. Why did they wait so long? The result is a gleaming, gorgeous journey through Beethoven’s ten violin sonatas, revealing a flourishing musical partnership.” – BBC Music Magazine
“Beethoven at its most seductive it would be the A major Sonata, Op 30 No I. The first movement is flexible in tone and tempo, the second truly a song without words, one of the loveliest accounts I’ve ever heard” – Gramophone
Paavo Järvi is nominated in two categories.
In the Concerto category, he is presented with Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, for the album released in October 2023 on Ondine. The album is dedicated in the memory of pianist Lars Vogt, and includes Brahms’ Double Concerto, Viotti’s Violin Concerto No.22 and Dvořák’s Silent Woods.
In the Symphonic Music category, Paavo is nominated with Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich for Bruckner’s Symphony No.8 release on Alpha in August 2023.
The composer Pierre Sancan, who was described as a “deft craftsman” by BBC Music Magazine, remains largely unknown in his native France. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s new CD with fellow Sancan student Yan Pascal Tortelier conducting BBC Philharmonic and flautist Adam Walker, titled Pierre Sancan: A Musical Tribute, has been hailed as being authentic, valuable and rewarding, and a fitting testimony to Sancan’s mastery of musical composition. The album has been nominated for an ICMA Award in the Assorted Programmes category.
Sir Stephen Hough’s recording of Musica Callada I‑IV is nominated in the Solo Instrument category, released by Hyperion records. Hyperion’s catalogue is becoming available digitally for the first time, and is now available for streaming.
“Hough is the ideal guide. He wholly inhabits the music’s mystical atmosphere, its holy simplicity. Exquisite sensitivity is matched by a steely strength. Sounds coalesce and insist on their presence, before disappearing into the ether. Austerity blends with warmth. It is, wrote the polymath Hough, ‘the music of evaporation’; his performance is one of perfectly judged understatement” BBC Music Magazine
“For repertoire like this, a pianist with a delicate touch is essential, and Hough’s subtleties are never-ending. Through minute gradations of dynamics or the fragile sculpting of a phrase, the sparest and simplest of these pieces assume a rare beauty … do give it a listen” The Times
Nicolas Altstaedt receives a nomination for his album – Regamey: Quintet & Schoenberg: String Trio - for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano” for Alpha Classic.
Under the artistic direction of Nicolas Altstaedt, this multi-award winning series in collaboration with the Lockenhaus Festival continues to bring to light great works of chamber music by composers who are already well known or still awaiting discovery. Schoenberg was in his early seventies when he composed his String Trio op. 45 in 1946, completing it after suffering a terrible heart attack. He told Thomas Mann that the trio reflected his physical and psychological condition of that period. The composer Constantin Regamey, born in Kiev in 1907, is little known. A Swiss of Polish descent, he was also a pianist, music critic and writer, who was appointed lecturer in Indian philology at Warsaw University in 1936. He joined the Polish Resistance in 1942 and it was at this time that he wrote his Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano.
Jörg Widmann and the Hagen Quartet are nominated in the Chamber Music category for their Mozart & Widmann Clarinet Quintets release, uniting Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major ‘Stadler Quintet’ and Widmann’s Clarinet Quintet. Hardly any combination of instruments is more appealing than a string quartet and a clarinet; together they make a magical mélange. The Hagen Quartet and Jörg Widmann have recorded Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, a “work among friends”, in this irresistible blend. Jörg Widmann, clarinettist and composer in equal measure, picks up on the omnipresent themes of “floating, love, and chant” in Mozart’s notes and creates a weighty counterpart to Mozart’s popular work with his own clarinet quintet, which is available here in a world premiere recording.
Violinist Randall Goosby is nominated in the Concerto category for his acclaimed recording of Bruch and Price Violin Concertos with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra. The recording was listed as Classic FM’s Album of the Week and selected as Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice while Randall was named as “Price’s ideal champion” (The Guardian). Acclaimed for the sensitivity and intensity of his musicianship, Randall is also known for his desire to make music inclusive and accessible, bringing the work of under-represented composers to light.
Christian Tetzlaff and sister Tanja Tetzlaff joined in a final collaboration with long-time friend and colleague, pianist Lars Vogt, to record Schubert Piano Trios which is nominated in the Chamber Music category. The recording of Schubert’s E flat trio is particularly poignant, written in Schubert’s final year and pondering on Beethoven’s death earlier in 1827, it is a fitting tribute to Vogt who died in 2022. The piano trios, alongside the Notturno, Rondo and Arpeggione are “the latest in a peerless series of releases with the Tetzlaffs that bears witness to a relationship not just between three artists of stature, but among intimates with a common, fearless commitment to expression” (New York Times).
Patricia Kopatchinskaja is nominated in the Chamber Music category for her album of Janacek, Brahms and Bartók violin sonatas alongside pianist Fazil Say. This record marked the reformation of the legendary duo, with Patricia quoting the Turkish pianist “is a volcano, with an indomitable strength and energy”, while he emphasisd the “freedom” that her “spontaneous playing” exudes: “At each concert, she creates a different character and tells a new story”.
Francesco Piemontesi is nominated in the Solo Instrument category for his Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes and Sonata in B Minor album on Pentatone.
“For me, the most important thing was to reproduce the orchestral sound Liszt wanted to achieve with his compositions – and this applies to both the Etudes and the B minor Sonata. My aim was and is to work out the individual voices from the score – a flute here, the timpani there, the orchestral tutti there – and to let the piano transcend into a colourful orchestra.” Francesco Piemontesi
