MUSICAL AMERICA ANNOUNCES 2010 AWARDS Conductor Riccardo Muti Named Musician of the Year

MUSICAL AMERICA ANNOUNCES 2010 AWARDS

Conductor Riccardo Muti Named Musician of the Year
Louis Andriessen, Joshua Bell, Elina Garanca, and Warren Jones recognized as Composer, Instrumentalist, Vocalist, and Collaborative Pianist of the Year

NEW YORK, N.Y. Nov. 10 – 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 2010 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 will be presented in a special ceremony at Lincoln Center on December 14.

MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR: RICCARDO MUTI
Riccardo Muti’s appointment as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which begins in September 2010, is only the most recent of several major international posts in his illustrious career. In America he was music director of The Philadelphia Orchestra from 1980 to 1992. He was chief conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra from 1972 to 1982 and music director of the famed Teatro alla Scala from 1986 to 2005. In addition, Maestro Muti has conducted most of the great orchestras of the world, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich’s Bavarian Radio Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and Orchestre National de France, as well as the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he has appeared at the Salzburg Festival since 1971. In 2010 he also becomes director of the Rome Opera. He has recorded extensively for EMI Classics and is the recipient of innumerable honors and prizes.

COMPOSER OF THE YEAR: LOUIS ANDRIESSEN
Louis Andriessen is recognized internationally as Holland’s most influential and revered composer. He has been the subject of festivals at Lincoln Center and the Southbank Centre, has taught at Princeton, and been commissioned by the Netherlands Opera four times. This season he will occupy the Composer Chair at Carnegie Hall. At 70, he remains a rebel with a very large cause–a prolific composer of unfailing creativity and challenge. He has been mentor to young composers, and his music is in demand by boisterous alternative new-music groups everywhere. Simply stated, his time has come.

INSTRUMENTALIST OF THE YEAR: JOSHUA BELL
Joshua Bell is today’s most celebrated American violinist. Early this month he performed and worked with young musicians at the White House in First Lady Michelle Obama’s program celebrating the arts in America. A winner of multiple Grammy Awards and Emmy nominations, he also appeared on screen as himself with Meryl Streep in Music of the Heart. The old-school Romantic warmth of his tone and lyrical interpretive style, coupled with a rare catholicity of music interests, have received particular praise. His new CD of duets, At Home with My Friends, was recently released on Sony Classical.

VOCALIST OF THE YEAR: ELINA GARANCA
Elina Garanca is better known in Europe than in America, but this is likely to change with the New Year as she takes on Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera. Such a dramatic role makes an ideal showcase for Garanca’s big, lush, dark-hued mezzo, easy high notes, seamless legato, and physical ease onstage. Earlier appearances at the Met were in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola. She has several Carmens scheduled overseas this year, and a Deutsche Grammophon contract has teamed her Romeo with Anna Netrebko’s Giulietta in Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi.

COLLABORATIVE PIANIST OF THE YEAR: WARREN JONES
Warren Jones compares partnering soloists to playing doubles tennis because the endeavor has to be an equal relationship. Few collaborative pianists—a term now preferred to “accompanist”—have enhanced the performances of so many of the world’s greatest singers and instrumentalists. Among those benefitting from his nuanced, insightful, and virtuosic artistry are Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Battle, Samuel Ramey, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Stephanie Blythe. In soprano Ruth Ann Swenson’s words, “He’s one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever known. I trust him completely.”

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MUSICAL AMERICA
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 www.musicalamerica.com.

The annual Directory, known as the “bible” of the industry, features over 14,000 detailed listings of worldwide arts organizations, with over 10,000 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 listing is below). Awards for Instrumentalist, Conductor, Composer, and Vocalist of the Year date from 1992; Ensemble of the Year from 1995. All are listed on www.musicalamerica.com.

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 www.musicalamerica.com.

Musical America is published by Commonwealth Business Media (www.cbizmedia.com), 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