Bern Music Prize 2023 awarded
This year, the Canton of Bern is awarding Patrick Demenga, Christine Lauterburg, Bänz Oester and the Duo Tootard a music prize of CHF 15,000 each. The "Coup de cœur" prize for young talent, worth CHF 3,000, goes to Annie Aries.
Cellist Patrick Demenga founded the Jahreszeiten-Konzerte in Blumenstein, which he directed from 1995 to 2015. From 2002 to 2006 he was artistic director of the cello festival Viva Cello in Liestal. He has been artistic director of the Meiringen Music Festival since 2005. He teaches at the Haute Ecole de Musique in Lausanne and at the Accademia di Musica di Pinerolo in Italy, among others.
Christine Lauterburg is a pioneer of new Swiss folk music and is now also at home as a singer and musician in pop, chanson and world music. She has been performing with the band Doppelbock for more than 20 years and has helped write Swiss music and cultural history with companions such as Cyrill Schläpfer, Hank Shizzoe, Michael von der Heide and Gardi Hutter.
Bänz Oester is one of the outstanding double bass players on the Swiss jazz scene. With his current main project The Rainmakers, he has been on tour in Switzerland, Europe and South Africa this year. He teaches at two universities, the Haute Ecole de Musique in Lausanne and the Musikakademie in Basel. His students include Colin Vallon, Andreas Schärer and Elina Duni.
The Tootard duo consists of the two brothers Hasan and Rami Nakhleh. They grew up stateless in the buffer zone between Israel and Syria and now live in Bern. Their music is a mixture of Southwest Asian disco beats, psychedelic rock, Arabic music and desert blues. They tour Europe, Canada, Japan and the Arab world and also play in the Palestinian autonomous area in the West Bank.
Annie Ruefenacht is behind the stage name Annie Aries. The Swiss-Filipino composer completed a Master's degree in Music and Media Arts at Bern University of the Arts (HKB). She has been teaching in the Sound Arts program at HKB since 2019. In her works, she creates minimalist sound textures and recurring rhythmic patterns that interweave organically. Her works have been presented at festivals in New York, San Francisco and Bern, among others.
