2022 FRITZ GERBER AWARD
Percussionist Elliott James Harrison, cellist Charlotte Elise Lorenz, and pianist Yilan Zhao have been chosen to receive the 2022 Fritz Gerber Award.
This year’s Fritz Gerber Award will be given to the percussionist Elliott James Harrison, cellist Charlotte Elise Lorenz, and pianist Yilan Zhao. The prize has been awarded annually since 2015 to young, highly talented musicians. Each of the three musicians will receive a scholarship valued at CHF 10,000 that allows them to attend the Lucerne Festival Academy, as well as a cash award of CHF 10,000.
Born in 1995 in Hunan Province in southern China, the pianist Yilan Zhao completed her bachelor's studies at the Juilliard School in New York with Hung-Kuan Chen, Robert D. Levin, and Matti Raekallio, among others. Since 2018, she has been studying with Konstantin Scherbakov at the Zurich University of the Arts. Among her awards are first prize at the 2019 Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition in New York and the Duttweiler Hug Competition at the Zurich University of the Arts. She has performed with orchestras such as the Musikkollegium Winterthur and the Orchestra del Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova.
This year’s jury consisted of Michael Haefliger, Executive and Artistic Director of Lucerne Festival; composer and conductor Heinz Holliger; and Felix Heri, Director of Lucerne Festival Contemporary.
The Lucerne Festival Academy is a school for new music and a laboratory for the future. Every summer, some 100 talented young musicians from all over the world are given the opportunity to concentrate on a repertoire that is still too much overlooked in the classical music business: the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Through daily rehearsals and workshops over a three-week period, they immerse themselves in key selected works of Modernism; work on and rehearse brand-new scores that are often written especially for the Academy; and experiment with innovative forms of performance. The Festival audience in turn benefits from unconventional programs that teem with discoveries and offer amazing listening experiences.