The international composition competition featured 97 composers from 28 countries. The first prize of a million yen (about 7,600 euro) was given to Marcin Stańczyk for SIGHS - Hommage à Fryderyk Chopin. Harrison Birtwistle, this year's juror, wrote the following to justify giving the award to the Polish composer:
An extraordinarily ambitious piece. I know of nothing like it. [...] What attracts me is the simultaneity of the perspective of the ideas and the music’s invention from moment to moment expressed in a notation that is both free and exact at the same time.
The Toru Takemitsu Composition Award is an annual prize, awarded since 1997 to works created by young composers. The award was founded by Toru Takemitsu, the acclaimed Japanese composer and author of writings on aesthetics and music theory. The unusual jury process makes the contest unique - every year the winner is determined by a single person. Takemitsu appointed three of his most esteemed colleagues: Henri Dutilleux, György Ligeti and Luciano Berio. Each of them made up a one-person commission for a year, after which they passed the torch to their three successors for the next cycle.
This year's judge was the British composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle. In 2014, Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös will assume the position, and the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho will take the jury chair the following year.
Marcin Stańczyk (born 1977) studied composition with Zygmunt Krauze at Łódź Academy of Music. He has taken part in workshops including those of Klangforum Wien and La Biennale di Venezia with Trilok Gurtu (2007, 2008), and the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music (2010). In 2012, he did a year-long internship in Paris with Studio IRCAM, in addition to his portrait concert at the Sacrum Profanum festival in Kraków.
His compositions stand out because of the complexity and wealth of unexpected differences between the different elements of a single track. Stańczyk presented his latest compositions in the U.S. in 2013. In March, the festival Noise Non-ference in New York City performed Suggested Music. In April, the MATA Festival audience heard Mosaique performed by Jonathan Gotlibovich, a notable young Israeli violinist, with the electronic part performed by the composer.
For more on the artist, see http://marcinstanczyk.com/.
Author: Filip Lech, May 2013.
27.05.2013