Gramophone 2020 Award winners features HarrisonParrott Artists
21/9/2020
Gramophone has announced the winners of the 10 categories of its annual classical music awards 2020, widely regarded as the ‘Oscars of classical music’. The awards ceremony will take place on 6 October at an online gala streamed live on gramophone.co.uk and medici.tv.
This year’s Chamber category was secured by players Nicolas Altstaedt, Vilde Frang, Barnabás Kelemen, Lawrence Power and Alexander Lonquich. Their recording of Béla Bartók’s Piano Quintet and Sándor Veress’s String Trio on Alpha Classics was deemed“unmissable” by Gramophone on its release this year.
In 2012, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt succeeded Gidon Kremer as Artistic Director of the Lockenhaus Festival and now continues the festival’s new vision of chamber music. Nicolas’s curation of the album, in partnership with Lockenhaus, spans almost a decade: discovering, studying, playing recording and living these two masterpieces.
In their second Gramophone Award (having previously won the same award in 2017) Bach Collegium Japan win this year’s Choral category under Masaaki Suzuki with their recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion on the BIS label. This is their second recording of the work and, after 20 years of performing the music of Bach, they have reached new levels of insight and expression resulting in an album that, as Gramophone put it, “takes us on a journey which will continually enthral, move and surprise”.
Winning the Concerto category with their recording of two Chopin piano concertos is Elim Chan, Benjamin Grosvenor and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on the Decca label. Gramophone hailed the “bold decisions” taken by the musicians that makes you rethink these works and appreciate them all over again.
