«Akhnaten», de Glass, y «Plaisirs illuminés», de Francisco Coll, premios «BBC Music Magazine».

The winners of the 16th BBC Music Magazine Awards – the only classical music recording awards where the main categories are voted for by the public – were announced last night at a live ceremony at London’s Kings Place hosted by BBC Music Magazine editor Charlotte Smith and BBC Radio 3 presenter Tom Service, and featuring live performances from several of the award winners, including Personality of the Year, tenor Nicky Spence, and Premiere Award-winning pianist Tom Poster and violinist Elena Urioste.

Among the prizes awarded to contemporary works, the Opera category award went to Akhnaten, by the American composer Philip Glass, performed by Anthony Roth Costanzo and the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Karen Kamensek. Glass’s opera competed against two works by Handel, Ariodante and Rodelinda.

The Premiere Award went to The Jukebox Album, an album that includes several of the pieces that American violinist Elena Urioste (of Basque origins on her father’s side) and her husband, British pianist Tom Poster, performed on the Internet during the Spring 2020 confinement. Instead of the original performances they gave in those 88 days – one for each key of the piano – the disc offers studio recordings of seventeen of those pieces, including contemporary works by composers such as Huw Watkin, Mark Simpson, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Clarice Assad, Jesse Montgomery or Donald Grant, along with pieces from the beginning of the 20th century or even popular classics by Carlos Gardel, Louis Guglielmi or Cole Porter.

Another prize to be highlighted is the Concerto, for the disc Plaisirs illuminés, by Camerata Bern, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Sol Gabetta, which includes – among works by Veress, Ginastera, Bartók, Kurtág and Ligeti – the four movements of Les Plaisirs illuminés, the double concerto for violin, cello and orchestra that gives the disc its title, composed expressly for the Camerata Bern, in 2018, by the Spanish composer Francisco Coll-García – by whom LalulaLied is also included -, and which is inspired by Dalí’s painting Los placeres iluminados (The Illuminated Pleasures), a work belonging to the MoMA in New York. Coll-García made his debut as a conductor conducting the Camerata in this performance.