Iván Fischer has been nominated for the Artist of the Year Award by the British Gramophone magazine. The Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Music Director is the only Hungarian nominee on an impressive list of ten musicians.
Iván Fischer, the Music Director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, has been shortlisted by Gramophone magazine as one of the ten musicians to have most enriched music–making over the past year.
The magazine said: “Synonymous with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1983, Iván Fischer is also Music Director of Berlin’s Konzerthaus and Principal Conductor of the Konzerthausorchester. His Mahler recordings for Channel Classics have, as usual, drawn enthusiastic reviews, responding to Fischer’s characteristically imaginative and fresh musical views.” Gramophone magazine adds that the Festival Orchestra’s latest Mahler recording, Symphony No. 9, “is superb”. The orchestra has won two previous Gramophone Awards - the classical music equivalent of the Oscars. They received the coveted prize for their 1998 recording of Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, and again in 2007 for Mahler’s Second Symphony. In 2009, the BFO was the only symphony orchestra to be nominated in two categories. Two other conductors besides Iván Fischer, Edward Gardner and Paavo Järvi, have also been shortlisted. For the full list of the nominees, click here. The Artist of the Year will be decided through a poll of the magazine’s readers. You can cast your vote until July 31 at the Gramophone website. The winner will be announced on September 17.