The first Fanny Mendelssohn Composition Prize has been awarded to South Korean composer, Sunghyun Lee.
The 28-year-old Seoul native completed his bachelor's degree at Seoul National University, and his his master's program at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Italy. He has also won awards at the Geneva International Music Competition and the "Appassionato Ensemble" International Competition, and his works have been featured, among others, in the Tongyeong International Music Festival, the Como Contemporary Festival, and the Daegu International Contemporary Music Festival. Currently, he resides in Frankfurt and is studying composition under Professor Oliver Schneller at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf.
The competition winner was chosen by a jury comprising pianist Ragna Schirmer, composer Charlotte Seither, soprano Sarah Maria Sun, and Hungarian trumpeter Tamás Pálfalvi. Schirmer remarked: "We were positively surprised by the great interest in this competition. Young composers from six different European countries applied. Choosing a winner from this diversity was no easy task. But Sunghyun Lee convinced us all with his expressiveness and creativity."
Besides receiving a €10,000 prize, Lee has also been commissioned to write an 8-minute-long piece for Fanny Mendelssohn Prize finalist, violinist Wassili Wohlgemuth. Wohlgemuth's Elster Trio, comprising himself, cellist Davide Carlassara and pianist Jacopo Giovannini, will perform the work at the KlangART Vision Festival on November 23 this year.
The Fanny Mendelssohn Composition Prize is mounted by the Fanny Mendelssohn Förderpreis-or Sponsorship Prize-founded in 2015 by Heide Schwarzweller. It was inspired by the creativity and courage of Fanny Mendelssohn-sister of composer Felix Mendelssohn. She continued writing music despite the 19th century's disapproval of female composers, and had the first of her nearly 500 works published in the last years of her life. According to its website, Schwarzweller founded the Förderpreis to "enable [young musicians] to do what Fanny couldn't, i.e., to be able to present their visions and musical concepts to a larger audience."
