Waser Prize goes to Jonathan Leibovitz
This is the fifth time that the Arthur Waser Prize has been awarded, and this year it goes to 25-year-old clarinettist Jonathan Leibovitz from Israel.
Leibovitz was born in Tel Aviv in 1997 and began his musical training with Eva Wasserman. He then studied with Yevgeny Yehudin at the Buchmann Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv, where he won numerous prizes, including 1st prize at the AICF Aviv Competition (2020) and the Israeli Wind Competition (2016 and 2018). In the 2019/20 season he was a member of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
The award is presented to Jonathan Leibovitz by the Arthur Waser Foundation and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and includes prize money of CHF 25,000 as well as a debut at the KKL Lucerne with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. On November 9 and 10, the Israeli musician will perform Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto, while other works on the program include Antonín Dvořák's "Slavonic Dances" and Leoš Janáček's "Sinfonietta", conducted by Juanjo Mena.
The Arthur Waser Foundation was established in 2000 by Lucerne entrepreneur Arthur Waser and is active in Switzerland and several African countries. Previous prizewinners include the organist Sebastian Küchler-Blessing from Germany (2013), the French cellist Edgar Moreau (2015), the Chinese-American pianist George Li (2017) and the trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary from France (2019).
