Inaugural Warner Music Prize Winner, Augustin Hadelich, Performs Tonight at New York’s Greene Space, Presented by WQXR
Grammy Award-winning violinist Augustin Hadelich, the inaugural recipient of the Warner Music Prize, gives a recital tonight with pianist Kuang-Hao Huang at New York’s Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, presented by WQXR and live-streamed on both WQXR.org and medici.tv at 7pm, EDT. The Warner Music Prize, established by Warner Music Group and the Blavatnik Family Foundation, features a cash award of $100,000 and recognizes young classical musicians of exceptional talent and promise, selected by a jury of world-renowned classical artists and industry leaders. In conjunction with his Warner Music Prize, Hadelich will be recording an album of the Paganini Caprices for Warner Classics, as well as producing a companion video.
The jury for the 2015 Warner Music Prize included Grammy Award-winning soprano Deborah Voigt; LA Opera Music Director James Conlon; Juilliard Provost and Dean Ara Guzelimian; Kathryn Enticott, founding director of Enticott Music Management; and Donald Wagner, director of Warner Music Group. Nominees for the prize were drawn from those young singers and instrumentalists presented by Carnegie Hall in significant solo performances during the 2014-15 concert season. In addition, Warner Music and the Blavatnik Family Foundation made a contribution to the Harmony Program – a nonprofit organization that provides afterschool music education programs in underserved communities across New York City – and Hadelich met and worked with Harmony Program students.
Hadelich – declared to be a player of “magisterial poise and serene control” by the New York Times – will perform three works in his Greene Space recital: Tchaikovsky’s Valse-Scherzo; the Divertimento from Stravinsky’s ballet The Fairy’s Kiss, which was conceived as an homage to Tchaikovsky on the 35th anniversary of his death; and Sarasate’s technically demanding Carmen Fantasy. As the Washington Post said of the young violinist:
“The essence of Hadelich’s playing is beauty: reveling in the myriad ways of making a phrase come alive on the violin, delivering the musical message with no technical impediments whatsoever, and thereby revealing something from a plane beyond ours.”
This has been a banner season for Hadelich. After winning the Warner Music Prize last fall, he scored his first Grammy Award in February for his recording of Dutilleux’s Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. He also added a new album to his extensive discography, recording Tchaikovsky’s notoriously difficult Violin Concerto along with the piece that inspired it, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, with the London Philharmonic, and made debuts with the Chicago Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall. Other season highlights included a residency with the Bournemouth Symphony, numerous recitals in Germany, and return appearances with the London Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphonies of Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Louisville, Milwaukee, New Jersey, Oregon, Seattle, Utah, and Vancouver. In addition to winning the Warner Music Prize, he was the winner of a Gold Medal at the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis in 2006, an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2009, a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2011, and Lincoln Center’s 2012 Martin E. Segal Award.
Click here for high-resolution photos of Augustin Hadelich.
About Warner Music Group
With its broad roster of new stars and legendary artists, Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry, including Asylum, Atlantic, Big Beat, East West, Elektra, Erato, Fueled by Ramen, Nonesuch, Parlophone, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Rykodisc, Sire, Warner Bros., Warner Classics, and Warner Music Nashville, as well as Warner/Chappell Music, one of the world’s leading music publishers, with a catalogue of more than one million copyrights worldwide.
About the Harmony Program
A nonprofit organization that provides afterschool music education programs in underserved communities across New York City, the Harmony Program began as a pilot program in the New York City Mayor’s Office in 2003 and was incorporated as an independent nonprofit organization the following year. In 2008, Harmony established an institutional partnership with the City University of New York, and was re-launched in its current model with an emphasis on intensive instruction, ensemble performance, and teacher training. Click here for high-resolution photos of the Harmony Program.
About the Blavatnik Family Foundation
The Blavatnik Family Foundation is an active supporter of many leading educational, scientific, cultural and charitable institutions throughout the world. The Foundation is headed by Len Blavatnik, an American industrialist and philanthropist, and the founder and chairman of Access Industries, a privately held U.S. industrial group with global interests in natural resources and chemicals, media and telecommunications, technology and e-commerce, and real estate. Among its numerous activities involving young people, the Foundation created the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in 2007 to acknowledge the excellence of the most noteworthy young scientists and engineers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The awards program was expanded in 2014 to encompass faculty-level scientists on a national level. In 2010, Mr. Blavatnik and the Foundation established the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford to train outstanding graduates from across the globe in the skills and responsibilities of government.
http://www.accessindustries.com/about/len-blavatnik/
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© 21C Media Group, April 2016