| MUSICAL AMERICA ANNOUNCES 2013 AWARDS Gustavo Dudamel Named Musician of the Year David Lang, Wu Man, Joyce DiDonato, and José Antonio Abreu Recognized as Composer, Instrumentalist, Vocalist, and Educator of the Year  NEW YORK, N.Y. Nov. 6 -- Musical America, now in its third century as the indispensable resource for the performing arts, today announced the winners of the annual Musical America Awards, recognizing artistic excellence and achievement in the arts.
The announcement coincides with the publication of the 2013 Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, which, in addition to its comprehensive industry listings, pays homage to each of these artists in its editorial pages.  The annual Musical America Awards, sponsored by Deutsche Grammophon will be presented in a special ceremony at Lincoln Center on Thursday, December 6.
Cover Photo: Mathew Imaging | |
| MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR: GUSTAVO DUDAMEL In eight short years, 31-year-old Gustavo Dudamel has become more in demand than any conductor in the world. He is a household name in Los Angeles, where he is music director of the Philharmonic. He is mobbed in Berlin, Vienna, Milan, London, and Caracas, Venezuela, where he is one of his country's best-known and well-loved celebrities. Often compared to Leonard Bernstein, Dudamel shares the American conductor's charisma, tireless advocacy for music education, and expressive music-making. Dudamel studied violin as a child, and in his early teens he was invited to study conducting with José Antonio Abreu, architect of Venezuela's famed El Sistema music-education program. At age 18 he became music director of the Sistema's elite Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. In 2004, at age 23, he won the Bamberg Symphony's Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition, and in 2007 he began a five-year appointment with Sweden's Gothenburg Symphony, which recently ended with his being named honorary conductor. His Los Angeles appointment, which began in September 2009, has been distinguished by the orchestra's founding of the Sistema-like Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA) and a continuation of the orchestra's and his own commitment to new music, notably that of John Adams, who is the LAPhil's creative consultant. | |
COMPOSER OF THE YEAR: DAVID LANG  David Lang's early music, laced with elements of rock and minimalism, was at once bracing and controversial, heavily influenced by the Bang on a Can school he co-founded. As he tells critic Tim Page in Musical America's tribute, however, "People should change as they get older, and I did." Lang's the little match girl passion, set not for rock band but for a rarified quartet of two sopranos, tenor, and bass-baritone, all of whom play small percussion instruments, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. A setting of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, it has been performed several hundred times internationally and also has been staged and choreographed. He made his New York City Ballet debut with plainspoken in 2010. Among numerous commissions, his new theater work, whisper opera, will receive its premiere in Chicago early next year by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).
Photo: Peter Serling | |
INSTRUMENTALIST OF THE YEAR: WU MAN  Wu Man is the very model of a modern soloist. More importantly, her work is part of a big step in the evolution of Western classical music. The best measure of her achievement is that her instrument, the pipa--a Chinese lute that dates back some 2,000 years--is no longer an exotic curiosity. Symphony audiences have heard her perform concertos by Lou Harrison and Tan Dun. She performs regularly with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, the Kronos Quartet, as a soloist in Bang on a Can marathons, and in chamber groups and orchestras giving the premieres of works by Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Chen Yi, and Bright Sheng, who have written pipa parts into their works with her sound and dexterity in mind.
Photo: Stephen Kahn | |
| VOCALIST OF THE YEAR: JOYCE DIDONATO | |  Joyce DiDonato is the American opera singer par excellence. Onstage or off, there are few people in opera who radiate this Kansas native's degree of natural goodness and warmth. For all these qualities, however, the intensity, fury, and abandon of roles such as Donizetti's Maria Stuarda are well within her emotional range, as she proved at Houston Grand Opera last season. This season she performs a recital program called "Drama Queens," featuring Baroque arias sung by royal characters (recorded by Virgin Records). Operatic appearances include a reprise of the title role in Maria Stuarda at the Metropolitan Opera, Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Munich and Kansas City, Elena in Rossini's La donna del lago in Santa Fe, and the title role in Cendrillon in Barcelona.
Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera |
EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR: JOSE ANTONIO ABREU | |  José Antonio Abreu has been hailed as a visionary, not only in his native Venezuela but throughout the world, as architect of the extraordinary music-education program called El Sistema. He is quick to point out that "Venezuela's musical miracle" is not a musical project, but a social action project. Some of his students, 80 percent of whom have come from low-income backgrounds, have gone on to be performers and music teachers, but many are
politicians, diplomats, academics, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, and community leaders--in short, pillars of society. El Sistema represents education in the widest possible sense, and Abreu, at 74, is still lit from within by the fire of its possibility. Photo: El Sistema |
ABOUT MUSICAL AMERICA WORLDWIDE
Founded as a weekly newspaper in 1898, Musical America through the years has appeared in a variety of formats. Today, it is both the International Directory of the Performing Arts and MusicalAmerica.com. The annual Directory, known as the "bible" of the industry, features over 14,000 detailed listings of worldwide arts organizations, with over 8,000 artists indexed both alphabetically and categorically. The first Directory was published in 1960, which is also when the tradition of choosing a Musician of the Year began. (A complete list is below). Awards for Instrumentalist, Conductor, Composer, and Vocalist of the Year date from 1992; Ensemble of the Year from 1995. All are available at Honorees. Returning to Musical America's newspaper roots, MusicalAmerica.com was launched in December 1998 and now publishes up to six performing arts news stories daily, by national and international correspondents around the globe. Most of the Directory listings are also available at MusicalAmerica.com. Musical Americais published by UBM Global Trade, a subsidiary of United Business Media plc (www.unitedbusinessmedia.com) and a leading data publisher, information services provider, and conference producer in the business-to-business community.
Musicians of the Year 1960: Leonard Bernstein 1961: Leontyne Price 1962: Igor Stravinsky 1963: Erich Leinsdorf 1964: Benjamin Britten 1965: Vladimir Horowitz 1966: Yehudi Menuhin 1967: Leopold Stokowski 1968-69: Birgit Nilsson 1970: Beverly Sills 1971: Michael Tilson Thomas 1972: Pierre Boulez 1973: George Balanchine 1974: Sarah Caldwell 1975: Eugene Ormandy 1976: Arthur Rubinstein 1977: Plácido Domingo 1978: Alicia de Larrocha 1979: Rudolf Serkin 1980: Zubin Mehta 1981: Itzhak Perlman 1982: Jessye Norman 1983: Nathan Milstein 1984: James Levine 1985: Philip Glass 1986: Isaac Stern 1987: Mstislav Rostropovich 1988: Sir Georg Solti 1989: Leonard Bernstein 1990: Herbert von Karajan 1991: Gian Carlo Menotti 1992: Robert Shaw 1993: Kurt Masur 1994: Christa Ludwig 1995: Marilyn Horne 1996: The Juilliard String Quartet 1997: James Galway 1998: Seiji Ozawa 1999: André Previn 2000: Carnegie Hall 2001: Martha Argerich 2002: Sir Simon Rattle 2003: Kronos Quartet 2004: Wynton Marsalis 2005: Karita Mattila 2006: Esa-Pekka Salonen 2007: Bernard Haitink 2008: Anna Netrebko 2009: Yo-Yo Ma 2010: Riccardo Muti 2011: Anne-Sophie Mutter 2012: David Finckel and Wu Han |
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