Belmont Prize 1999
for Contemporary Music
Jörg Widmann
Composer & clarinetist
Freiburg im Breisgau and München
www.joergwidmann.com
“I have to admit that I am madly in love with the way Jörg Widmann prevents me from knowing what there is to know about him. ... In the background there is always this dream, this ‘let both come together,’ this ‘let composition and improvisation again become as one.’ He doesn’t make things easy for us. Namely, we never know exactly what’s coming in his music; and since we live in a world in which we are all insurance maniacs, we experience afresh the uncertainty, the peril of our lives ... I find in this music a deep-seated realism in the way it reasserts the daring, the danger of life, the way it viscerally confronts us with things we cannot foresee in advance.”
From the laudatory address by Peter Gülke
