Award for Bettina Skrzypczak
This year's Heidelberg Women Artists' Prize will be awarded during a concert on February 19. Skrzypczak's orchestral work "Initial" will be performed.
Bettina Skrzypczak is awarded the Heidelberg Women Artists' Prize for the year 2020. The award ceremony will take place on February 19, 2020 as part of a Concert of the Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra. The award was established in 1987 and is the only prize in the world to be awarded exclusively to female composers. The prizewinners include Sofia Gubaidulina (1991), Younghi Pagh-Paan (1995), Olga Neuwirth (2008), Isabel Mundry (2011) and Chaya Czernowin (2016).
The concert on February 19 - with a repeat performance on February 20 - will feature the orchestral work Initial by Bettina Skrzypczak. It was premiered by the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne at the Festival Les Amplitudes in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2007. Since then, it has been performed several times internationally, for example at the Warsaw Autumn Festival and the Biennale Musica in Venice.
Bettina Skrzypczak is Professor of Composition and Theory at the Lucerne School of Music. She has been involved in Swiss cultural life for many years; until 2016 she directed the Ensemble Boswil for contemporary music, and in 2015 she curated the Tage für Neue Musik Zürich. She is in demand as a juror, expert and guest lecturer at international composition courses. She is the author of numerous texts on contemporary music. She is currently working on an orchestral composition for the Lucerne Festival, which will be premiered by the Basel Sinfonietta on September 6.
