The Cremona Musica Award is an award conceived by CremonaFiere in 2014, assigned every year during Cremona Musica International Exhibitions and Festival to people and institutions of the world of music that achieved excellence in their fields. The awards are presented by the President of CremonaFiere during the Fair.
Every year management and the scientific committee of Cremona Musica select the protagonists of International music that contributed to spread the great music and the values that are linked to the musical tradition.
The prizes are awarded for five categories: composition, performance, communication, project and, since 2018, guitar lutherie.
The link with the city of Cremona (a world-renowned icon of Italian excellence in music), the context of Cremona Musica (the main fair for high-quality musical instruments in the world) and the prestigious winners, have made the Cremona Musica Awards one of the most desired prizes in this field, since the very first editions.
In the last years many legendary personalities of music came to Cremona Musica to collect the award, including Alfred Brendel, Shlomo Mintz, Michael Nyman, Krzysztof Penderecki and many more.
In the 2018 edition the prize has been awarded to the conductor Valery Gergiev, the violinist Maxim Vengerov, the composer Giya Kancheli, the guitar luthier Hermann Hauser III, the writer Alessandro Baricco and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival.
For the 2019 edition the prize goes to the great violinist Salvatore Accardo, the conductor Ezio Bosso who will collect the Cremona Musica Award in the “communication” category; the guitarist Paco Peña; the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and for the project category, the prize was awarded to Amnon Weinstein for “Violins for Hope”.
The winners of the last edition were the extraordinary violinist Roby Lakatos, incomparable interpreter of Gypsy music; María Susana Azzi, cultural anthropologist who has thoroughly investigated the history of European immigration to Argentina from different perspectives: Argentine music and tango; the already multi-awarded Enrico Pieranunzi, who received the Cremona Musica Award for the “performance-jazz” category. For the “composition” category we had the pleasure to host Richard Danielpour at Cremona Musica. And finally, the pillar of A.I.A.R.P., the association that brings together Italian tuners, Luciano Del Rio, was awarded for the category “project”.
This year will be awarded: Christophe Coin (performance – strings); Valentin Silvestov (composition); Martin Engstroem (project); Chopin Competition – Artur Szklener (communication); David Kraukauer (performance – winds instruments); John Monteleone (guitar lutherie)
