11 November 2019

Busoni Composition Prize 2019 awarded to Hanna Eimermacher
Advancement Prize awarded to Hovik Sardaryan
Award Ceremony and Concert at 15 November, 8 pm
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz

This year, the Busoni Composition Prize, endowed with 6,000 euros, goes to composer Hanna Eimermacher, who lives in Gelsenkirchen. The 2,500-euro advancement prize has been awarded to Hovik Sardaryan from Armenia. The award ceremony and concert will take place on Friday, 15 November at Pariser Platz.

Aribert Reimann, composer, member of the Akademie and founder of the Busoni Composition Prize, will welcome the audience. At the award ceremony the ensemble mosaik and the Ensemble Apparat, conducted by Enno Poppe, will perform compositions by the two prizewinners together with works by Ferruccio Busoni, who gave the prize its name. The laudations will be held by Akademie and jury members Cornelius Schwehr and Helmut Zapf.

The concert will start with Hanna Eimermacher's about 30-minute work orange for 12 performers and sound gate, which was newly composed for the occasion of the award ceremony and for the open architecture of the Akademie der Künste, where visitors are already acoustically welcomed right at the front door. Then the composition by Hovik Sardaryan from 2015 Simulacres will be presented, in which different worldviews are placed in a common musical context. Finally, the compositions from the Indian Diary by Ferruccio Busoni are played. The less known compositions by Busoni testify to his interest in the tunes of indigenous cultures in North America at the beginning of the 20th century, which is a historical example of the currently discussed theme of cultural memories of First Nations.

Hanna Eimermacher (born 1981 in Duisburg) studied composition in Bremen with Younghi Pagh-Paan and Charlotte Seither, in Graz with Pierluigi Billone and Beat Furrer and in Frankfurt with Mark Andre. Her works have been performed internationally by Ictus Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, Ensemble Contrechamps and others. Performances take place at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Acht Brücken / Köln, MaerzMusik, Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, La Scala Paris and many more. She has been awarded residential fellowships at Villa Massimo, Rome and Villa Concordia, Bamberg and the Berlin-Rheinsberg Composition Prize.

Hovik Sardaryan, born in 1993 in Armenia, studied composition at the State Conservatory of Yerevan under Ashot Zohrabyan from 2010-2014. In 2012, he won prizes at the international Renaissance competition (Gjumri, Armenia) and the EstoVest Festival (Turin, Italy). In 2014, he won first prize in the Sayat Nova International Composition Competition and was awarded the Armenian State Philharmonic Prize and the Carnegie Hall Award. In 2016, he participated in master classes with Carola Bauckholt, Oscar Bianchi and Fabien Lévy and in a workshop with Toshio Hosokawa and Péter Eötvös in Budapest, where he met György Kurtág. From 2015-2018, Hovik Sardaryan was a DAAD scholar and studied composition under Wolfgang Rihm at the Karlsruhe University of Music. He is currently studying music informatics at the Karlsruhe University of Music.

Programme

Hanna Eimermacher
orange (2019 UA) for 12 performer und sound gate

Opening remarks
Aribert Reimann

Laudation
Cornelius Schwehr
Helmut Zapf

Hovik Sardaryan
Simulacres (2015) for ensemble

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924)
Indianisches Tagebuch, Erstes Buch – Vier Klavierstudien über Motive der Rothäute Amerikas BV 267 (1915) for piano

Indianisches Tagebuch, Zweites Buch – Gesang vom Reigen der Geister op. 47, BV 269 (1916), version for ensemble: Chatschatur Kanajan

ensemble mosaik
Ensemble Apparat
Enno Poppe, director

Event dates
Busoni Composition Prize 2019. Hanna Eimermacher
and Hovik Sardaryan (Advancement Prize)
Award Ceremony and Concert
Friday, 15 November 2019, 8 pm, free admission
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin

(See Press release from 13 August 2019)