Baldur Brönnimann receives the 2023 cultural prizes of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft
Our outgoing Principal Conductor, Baldur Brönnimann, has been awarded the Music Category Prize of the 2023 Basel-Landschaft Cantonal Culture Prize. The Culture Prize is awarded annually by the government council of the canton of Basel-Landschaft.
Dear Baldur, we are very happy for you and congratulate you warmly on this well-deserved award.
In his statement, Abélia Nordmann, a member of the Basel-Landschaft Cultural Council, makes clear what he has accomplished in recent years for the music scene in Basel and for contemporary music in Switzerland in general:
This year's Music Prize goes to a champion: a champion of the new, the visionary, the utopia. To an ambassador of the music of today and tomorrow: to someone who, radically future-oriented and unwavering, sits in the toy store of current and latest sounds, inviting people day after day to play along, to compose, to listen, to discover. The government council of the Canton of Basel-Landschaft honors this pioneering work, this spirit of adventure, with this year's Music Prize: it goes to Baldur Brönnimann, conductor at the pulse and on the podium of our time.
Baldur Brönnimann was born in Basel in 1968 and grew up in Pratteln. After his studies at the Basel Academy of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, he embarked on a career abroad. He carries with him decades of experience in interpreting major works of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as a long list of commissions and world premieres by both well-known and lesser-known composers of our time.
Baldur Brönnimann is a frequent guest conductor with all the world's leading orchestras and festivals for contemporary music. He lives in Madrid; from 2008 to 2012 he was chief conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, from 2011 to 2015 artistic director of the leading Norwegian ensemble for contemporary music «BIT20», and until 2020 chief conductor of the Orquestra Sinfónica of the Casa da Música in Porto.
In 2016, he took over the position of the first Principal Conductor of the Basel Sinfonietta, which until then had been organized on a grassroots democratic basis. Through his vibrant and fruitful collaboration with this globally unique large orchestra for contemporary music, Baldur Brönnimann has shaped the region and the scene – among other things through his tireless commitment to young people, the next generation, and the passing on of experience and practice: He has led the orchestra into a progressive organizational structure that enables young conductors and instrumentalists to experience working in and with the orchestra in all its creative, practical, and concrete complexity.
Composers can get to know "the orchestra in all its geography" through workshops and in their work on their pieces, gaining crucial experience in dialogue with a flexible ensemble. In a field whose music is still not at the center of listening habits, this is often a quiet, invisible process. Baldur Brönnimann describes it as "composing for the future, looking to the future.".
With the concerts of the 2022/23 season, Baldur Brönnimann bids farewell as Principal Conductor of the Basel Sinfonietta. His unwavering and uncompromising commitment to new and contemporary music, undoubtedly demonstrated with great composure and enthusiasm – this is what the Cantonal Council wishes to recognize with this year's Music Prize. Dear Baldur, you conclude your time with the Basel Sinfonietta with Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony, a piece that also reflects your personal perspective on music: the unexpected, the forward-looking, the yearning for freedom, the open horizon. In this spirit, on behalf of all the members of the Cantonal Council for Culture, I congratulate you most sincerely on this award!
