The Full Score
Jonny Greenwood and Richard Blackford among those on the 2020 winners’ list
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Major works by Jonny Greenwood and Richard Blackford are among the high-profile winners of this year’s Ivors Composer Awards. Greenwood took the Large Orchestral award for his Horror Vacui, scored for violin soloist and 68 strings, while Blackford’s dramatic Pietà won him the choral award. Other winners included Philip Venables’s opera Denis & Katya and, in the Sound Art category, Kathy Hinde’s Twittering Machines. Hinde’s award was, however, a rare success for female composers this year.
Sponsored by PRS for Music, the Ivors – formally known as the British Composer Awards – have been presented annually since 2004. Normally the occasion is marked by a ceremony in London, but this year the winners had to accept their gongs at home. For Blackford, this was his first win. ‘I’m so delighted Pietà was chosen,’ he tells BBC Music Magazine.
‘It was such a team e ort from Nimbus Reords, all the performers and, in particular, the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus – it is my third large-scale commission from them, for which I am particularly grateful.’
A setting of the Stabat Mater plus additional texts by the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova, Blackford’s 45-minute
Pietà is, he says, a present-day take on a traditional format: ‘In my choral works, I try to universalise the message and to make it as contemporary as possible. I
initially found the Stabat Mater quite remote from our times, but then I read Akhmatova’s evocation of grief about the loss of her son. I was also hearing stories of mothers whose children were killed by bombs in Syria. I found myself very preoccupied with contemporary expressions of mothers’ grief.’
As well as 11 category awards covering the various areas of performance from solo to large ensemble, three Special Awards were presented this year. In the jazz world, pianist and composer Julian Joseph was awarded the Academy Fellowship while Yazz Ahmed (above), whose music mixes Western and Arabic influences, received an Innovation Award. And there was also an Outstanding Works Collection for Cecilia Mcdowall, recognising the composer’s long and distinguished career.