Premiere Award 2023
The nominees for this year's BBC Music Magazine Premiere Award
Voting has now closed
Welcome to the 2023 BBC Music Magazine Awards
This year’s nominated recordings for the Premiere Award are listed below. Voting has now closed and the winners will be revealed at our Awards ceremony at Kings Place on Wednesday 19 April.
The nominations for the Premiere Award
Shades
Edmund Finnis: String Quartets Nos 1 & 2
Manchester Collective
Bedroom Community HVALUR42
Manchester Collective co-commissioned Edmund Finnis’s String Quartet No. 2 and its members performed it here ‘with captivating skill and a sense of searching co-adventure’. Paired with his 2018 String Quartet No. 1 on this short-but-exquisite mini album, the synergy of composer and musicians is very much apparent.
Caprices
Works by Tom Coult, Oliver Leith, Freya Waley-Cohen, Laurence Osborne, Roxanna Panufnik, and Seonaid Aitken
Fenella Humphreys (violin)
Rubicon RCD1074
Violinist Fenella Humphreys commissioned a handful of the works presented on this glittering celebration of all things Caprice, alongside other premiere recordings and a few Paganini numbers. Humphreys channelled that composer’s virtuosity for a selection we called ‘diverse but surprisingly cohesive’.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Ex Tenebris Lux etc
Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra/Karolis Variakojis
Ondine ODE 1403-2
These works for string orchestra by the brilliantly talented Lithuanian composer were composed since the onset of the global pandemic. As our August issue review said, Martinaitytė creates ‘vast shimmering soundscapes that lead the mind somewhere dreamlike and seem to speak directly to the body’s senses in arresting and unexpected ways’.
