Prizes awarded by the Fritz Gerber Foundation
This year's 2016 Fritz Gerber Foundation prizes go to Agata Nowak, Miguel Ángel Pérez Domingo and Alexandre Mastrangelo. Each of the three will receive prize money of CHF 10,000 and a CHF 10,000 scholarship to take part in the Lucerne Festival Academy.
Violinist Agata Nowak was born in Krakow in 1992 and initially studied at the Frédéric Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. She is currently studying for a master's degree at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne in the class of Francesco de Angelis.
Born in 1985, bassoonist Miguel Ángel Pérez Domingo comes from Valencia and studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel with Sergio Azzolini. He previously graduated from the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Aragón with Juan Sapiña.
Trombonist Alexandre Mastrangelo, born in 1989, studied both in his home town of Geneva at the Haute Ecole de Musique with Jacques Mauger and then with Ian Bousfield at the Bern University of the Arts.
As in 2015, the jury is made up of Michael Haefliger, the artistic director of the Lucerne Festival, the composer and conductor Heinz Holliger and several lecturers from the Ensemble intercontemporain.
The Fritz Gerber Foundation has been active since 1999. It supports talented young people with permanent residence in Switzerland. Support is provided in the form of financial contributions to education, training and further education and is intended to make a difference where no public funds are available to achieve the foundation's purpose.
