Belmont Prize 2007
for Contemporary Music

Statement from the Board of Trustees

With this award the Foundation honors a musician whose craftsmanship is pervaded by the clear light and jagged shadows of the Mediterranean cosmos. Again and again Mantovani enters uncharted compositional regions, transforms them, and leaves them for new ones. The striking physicality of his music makes sound perceivable as motion. His musical poetics bear the dual vision of classical order and construction, coupled with the protean expressivity and spontaneity of improvised music.

“In Bruno Mantovani’s music the ‘academic’ terrain which he shares with many others, and which, as we all know, is unable to guarantee the value of a composition, is fertilized by the practice of jazz improvisation. This confrontation between the ‘abstract’ structural principles of art music and the ‘concrete’ experience of musical form unites the opposites of excess and pragmatism in his distinctive style.”
Eric Denut