Winner of the ICMA ​‘Artist of the Year’ 2019 award, the international career of Javier Perianes has led him to perform in the most prestigious concert halls and collaborate with the world’s top orchestras and conductors. This season he returns to the London Philharmonic Orchestra to perform a Beethoven Cycle at the Royal Festival Hall after a Spanish tour with conductor Juanjo Mena. He performs Beethoven on tours to Australia and New Zealand, and has just completed a US tour of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.27 with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra which culminated in a return to New York’s Carnegie Hall. He also performs works by Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Falla and Bartók with orchestras such as Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Toronto, St. Louis, San Francisco and Milwaukee Symphony orchestras, Orchestre de Paris, BBC Scottish, and the Czech Philharmonic in his return to the Prague Spring Festival. In recital, Perianes appears in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Oslo, Lisbon, Istanbul, Barcelona and Madrid. He records exclusively for harmoniamundi. 

Bartók’s Violin Concertos Nos.1 and 2, performed by Christian Tetzlaff and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, led by its Chief Conductor Hannu Lintu, has won the Concerto category, with a recording captured during live performances in Helsinki. Previously awarded the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2018, and recently nominated in the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2019 both in the same category, the recording has received much critical acclaim since its release in April 2018. Further accolades includes being BBC Music Magazine​’s Concerto Choice and Gramophone magazine’s Editor’s Choice and Recording of the Month:​“I’m inclined to place [Tetzlaff’s] expertly recorded CD of the two concertos ahead of all rival versions. It’s that good!” (Rob Cowan, May 2018).

Barbara Hannigan wins in the Video Performance category. Hannigan brilliantly embodied the role of Elle in Warlikowski’s production of La Voix Humaine at Opéra de Paris in 2015 and again for its reprise in April 2018. The production combined Bartók’s Bluebeards Castle with Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine, combining the two one-act operas to one great performance. Hannigan has been featured as the operatic lead-role in several other productions including Lulu, Pelléas et Mélisande, Hamlet and Die Soldaten, the latter for which she won Germany’s Faust Award. She also created the roles of Agnès inWritten on Skin, and Isabel in Lessons in Love and Violence, by George Benjamin.