David Afkham. Photo: Chris Christodoulou
David Afkham, 27, a protégé of former Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal conductor Bernard Haitink, was announced today as the first recipient of the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award. The award comes with a €15,000 cash prize, about $20,000, from Swiss-based Nestlé, S.A., and is distinct from many other such competitions in focusing on contemporary music as well as the standard repertoire.
As a part of the award, the German-Parsi Afkham, a native of Freiburg who studied piano and violin there and in Weimar, also will lead the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival this Saturday, August 14, in a concert of Ligeti, Beethoven, and Shostakovich with Austrian pianist Till Fellner as soloist.
Afkham, currently assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and a Dudamel conducting fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was selected from 81 candidates (including 16 women) aged 22 to 35 in a multi-tiered process which culminated with three finalists leading the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal.
He was the unanimous choice of a nine-member jury chaired by Cleveland Orchestra and new Vienna State Opera music director Franz Welser-Möst that included pianist Mitsuko Uchida, Peter Alward of the Salzburg Easter Festival, former Edinburgh Festival director Brian McMaster, and representatives of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the German Orchestra Union, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, as well as Markus Hinterhäuser, intendant of next year's 2011 Salzburg Festival. Hinterhäuser worked closely with jury patron Pierre Boulez in designing the prize.
Afkham came to Haitink's attention four years ago when the veteran Dutch conductor began a series of master classes at his home base in Lucerne. "Where to start?" the boyish Afkham said at a press conference today in Salzburg. "I immediately recognized that this was not only a musical maestro I wished to learn from, but also someone from whose example I could learn much as a person." Subsequently working as an assistant to Haitink over two seasons in Chicago and across Europe, Afkham also led performances of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago as well as family concerts of the CSO itself.
In a Chicago Sun-Timesreview of a Civic concert led jointly with Haitink in December 2008, shortly after Afkham won the International Donatella Flick Competition, I found that the then-25-year-old conductor "showed maturity and care" in Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. He was also a guest that month on my radio program Critical Thinkingon 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com. You can hear that conversation here.
For his Salzburg Festival prize concert, Afkham has programmed Ligeti's 1961 Atmosphères, the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, and the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony in E minor, Op. 93, premièred in 1953.
"It is a huge responsibility as young conductors to be conscious of contemporary music," Afkham said at the Salzburg press conference. "It takes time to develop context and parameters for these works, but we really must consciously work to combine them in study and programming along with the great Beethoven symphonies and Haydn we learned in music school. You have to work to keep your mind open to these things, even when it is not easy."
Hinterhäuser, himself an important performer of contemporary piano music, new music presenter, and concerts director at the Salzburg Festival for the last four years, told the press conference that in Lisbon the jury had seen Afkham display "good rehearsal and performance technique and a secure self-awareness."
The award is to be given annually.
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