Fritz Gerber Awards 2020
This year's Fritz Gerber Award goes to pianist Helga Karen, double bassist Thomas Hong Yiu Lai and percussionist Aurélien Gignoux. The prize has been awarded every year since 2015 to young, highly talented musicians in connection with the Lucerne Festival Academy.
The three musicians will each receive prize money of CHF 10,000 and an additional scholarship in the form of participation in the academy worth a further CHF 10,000. As the summer festival and therefore also the academy cannot take place this summer due to the coronavirus pandemic, the scholarship is valid for next year. In summer 2021, Karen, Lai and Gignoux will take part in the Lucerne Festival Academy together with the winners of the Fritz Gerber Award 2021.
Born in 1991, Finnish pianist Helga Karen is a member of the Lemniscate ensemble in Basel. She received her Master of Arts in Specialized Musical Performance from the Hochschule für Musik Basel in 2016, where she studied with Mike Svoboda, Jürg Henneberger and Marcus Weiss, among others. She has attended masterclasses with Christian Dierstein, Florian Hoelscher, Nicolas Hodges, Benjamin Kobler and others. Since 2015, she has taken part in the Lucerne Festival Academy several times and also performed with the Lucerne Festival Alumni Orchestra in 2018.
Double bassist Thomas Hong Yiu Lai, born in Hong Kong in 1997, is completing his Master's degree in Music Education with Duncan McTier and Wies de Boevé at the Zurich University of the Arts. In 2019, he received a Master of Arts in Musical Performance from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts under Božo Paradžik. He currently plays with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in the Orchestra Academy. He has already been engaged on a project basis with the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Zurich at the Zurich Opera House.
The French-Swiss percussionist Aurélien Gignoux, born in 1997, studied at the conservatory in Paris with Gilles Durot, Jean-Claude Gengembre and Florent Jodelet. He has already played in the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski and Lorenzo Viotti. In 2019, he won the Osnabrück Music Prize as well as 2nd prize and the special prize for the best interpretation of the commissioned composition at the ARD Music Competition.
The Fritz Gerber Foundation for gifted young people has been active since 1999. It supports talented young people in the fields of crafts, culture and sport. Support is provided in the form of financial contributions to education, further education and training. Over the past 21 years, the foundation has supported over 2,300 talented young people with a total of over CHF 27 million.
