Cellist Sol Gabetta to be honored with the Grand Prix Music 2024
Published: Thursday, May 23rd 2024, 10:51
Updated At: Friday, May 24th 2024, 01:59
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The Federal Office of Culture is awarding the Grand Prix Music 2024 to cellist Sol Gabetta. The prestigious award is endowed with 100,000 francs. A further ten prizes go to yodeler Simone Felber and metal band Zeal & Ardor, among others.
Sol Gabetta is one of the most successful and best-known cellists of our time, wrote the Federal Office of Culture (BAK) in a press release on Thursday. Her repertoire includes the most important cello works from the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods through to the modern era: from the Vivaldi concertos to the cello works of the Viennese Classical period by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and the famous cello concertos by Schumann and Elgar through to Dimitri Shostakovich and Ernest Bloch.
Her final international breakthrough came in 2004 when she won the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award at the Lucerne Festival and made her debut with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. This was followed by many appearances as a soloist with renowned orchestras. In her career, Gabetta has worked with oboist and composer Heinz Holliger, who won the Grand Prix Musik in 2015, and with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the 2017 Grand Prix Musik winner.
Born in Argentina in 1981, she studied at the Basel University of Music and now lives in Olsberg in the canton of Aargau. In 2006, she co-founded the Solsberg Chamber Music Festival, which she has directed ever since.
Gabetta received the European Culture Prize in 2022. The organizers described her as an exceptional cellist. Shortly before Whitsun, she performed as a soloist at the third edition of the Presenza Whitsun Festival at the LAC cultural center in Lugano, together with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner.
Versatile award winners
In addition to the Grand Prix Music, the BAK has announced seven other music prizes, each worth CHF 40,000. The musical field is quite diverse. For example, the Geneva multi-instrumentalist Simone Aubert, who, according to the press release, is an integral part of the experimental music scene in Switzerland, was honored. Or the Lucerne mezzo-soprano and yodeler Simone Felber, who worked with Aubert and is a formative voice in contemporary folk music.
The Basel metal band Zeal & Ardor, led by Manuel Gagneux, also received a music award. Gagneux's idea to combine black metal and gospel was born in an internet forum when the musician asked which musical styles should definitely be combined. The debut album was released in 2017, since when Zeal & Ardor have enjoyed worldwide success. The band will be touring Europe this summer.
Choir composer Ivo Antognini (TI), violinist Leila Schayegh (BS), jazz saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve (ZH) and sound poet Zimoun (BE) can also look forward to receiving the music prize.
Focus on electronic music
The special prize was awarded to the Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival (VD), the Swiss Museum and Center of Electronic Musical Instruments in Fribourg and the Basel techno collective and label Somatic Rituals.
The festival focuses on underground culture; musically, Lausanne is all about noise, ambient and avant-garde. The merit of the festival is to raise awareness of the underground - without fear or consideration, as the BAK wrote.
The museum in turn has a collection of around 5,000 devices, one of the world's most important collections of electronic musical instruments. According to the BAK, such institutions keep the history of music and music production alive.
And the BAK praises Somatic Rituals because the label is not only musically innovative, but also socially committed and responsible. In its electronic music, it deals with its African roots.
With the Swiss Music Awards, the BAK honors outstanding and innovative Swiss music creation. The cultural institution is awarding the Grand Prix Music for the eleventh time and has so far presented 153 Swiss Music Awards. A seven-member jury selects the winners from all genres and all regions of Switzerland. The award ceremony will take place on September 12 at the Casino de Montbenon in Lausanne.
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