Classical Music

James MacMillan for The Cumnock Tryst 2023 - WINNER

The Cumnock Tryst is a 4-day international music festival including performances by world-class, local and amateur musicians and involving local participant groups, from schools to adult training centres, those with the most complex special needs to church choirs.  

The Cumnock Tryst is blazing a trail for how a contemporary festival can have a deep and profound impact on its community, in one of the most deprived areas of Scotland.

Anoushka Shankar for Chapter II: How Dark it is Before Dawn

Immersed from a young age on the world stage, with over a quarter-century’s performing behind her, Anoushka Shankar is a singular, genre-defying artist across classical, contemporary, acoustic and electronic. 

 In this second volume in a series of free-flowing, ambient-tinged mini-albums, the composer seeks out a new vocabulary for her instrument.  Anoushka’s tempests of sound present ancient instruments in modern light, not as static set pieces, but as living, breathing, and wildly expressive, full-bodied gifts to this world. 

Richard Blackford for Songs of Nadia Anjuman 

A brand-new work for voice and orchestra by the eminent composer Richard Blackford, Songs of Nadia takes five poems from an Afghan poet who, with enormous bravery, pursued her education and her writing in secret during the first Taliban era and was murdered by her husband as a result. She was only 25 years old.

Blackford has given her poems wonderfully sensitive settings and stuns the listener into a powerful response, not just to Anjuman’s tragedy but to the wider tragedy of Afghanistan, and particularly of Afghan women.