Honorary Awards
The annual committee of the PdSK awards Honorary Awards in the form of certificates to outstanding personalities who, as interpreters, artists, or producers, have made a noteworthy contribution to the recording of music on audio and video mediums.
Classical Music
François-Xavier Roth
A conductor who specializes in being a universalist: sounds contradictory, but means being true to yourself if you are as versatile, as alert, and as active as François-Xavier Roth. Popular as well as successful, he sets new trends season after season as general music director in Cologne and chief conductor in Gürzenich. He founded the French period performance ensemble »Les Siècles« and almost casually led it to international success. He places great importance on historical accuracy when exploring French music of the late nineteenth century and the fin de siècles: the right instruments are provided for each individual work, increasing the workload, but also the joy of listening when new timbres arise. His recordings cannot be consumed casually, they are too unique for that. His repertoire ranges from the early Baroque to the most recent present. And with every project he tackles, Roth sets new standards. His motto: »Music provokes. That is an experience. Music that does not provoke is boring.« For the annual committee: Joachim Mischke
The Honorary Award was presented live to François-Xavier Roth on 19th June 2022 as part of a concert in Cologne.
Producer
Alberto Basso
If there is someone who has refuted Igor Stravinsky’s much-quoted bon mot that Antonio Vivaldi is »a boring man who composed the same concert six hundred times«, it is the musicologist Alberto Basso, born in Turin in 1931. The Vivaldi edition he initiated and supervised for »Naïve« began in 2001 with an album with Concerti da camera and now comprises fifty-eight episodes – and it is far from over: one of the largest publishing projects in record history. The plan is to record all of Vivaldi’s approximately 450 works, the manuscripts of which are now in the National Library of Turin: operas and church music, arias, cantatas, sonatas, symphonies – and of course countless concerti, none of which are the same. With every new CD release of the edition, the wealth of this repertoire amazes the listener, and Basso’s passion and competence guarantee top-class interpretations and scientific accuracy – a life’s work! For the annual committee: Michael Stegemann
Maestro Alberto Basso accepted the PdSK Honorary Award for his Vivaldi Edition on the label naive in Turin, at a Vivaldi conference in the Lingotto – it was ceremoniously presented, complete with laudatory speech and champagne, in Berlin, in the Boris Vian Hall. The video is now available on YouTube.
Jazz, Rock, Pop
Moses Pelham
»I’m a living legend and would have retired long ago / if I could only find someone who could do the job.« So Moses Pelham rapped in the play »Höha, Schnella, weita«. That was almost a quarter of a century ago. Together with Thomas Hofmann, he founded the Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt (RHP), which stirred up the German-speaking rap scene. As an artist and producer as well as the founder and head of the 3p record label – pelham power productions, its motto: »Mehr Bass« (More bass) – Pelham remains on the road to success even after the dissolution of RHP: takes Schwester S. alias Sabrina Setlur under his wing as well as the rappers Illmatic, UnterWortverdacht, and Azad; he discovered Xavier Naidoo and founded the group Glashaus. And in 1998 he published his first solo album, »Geteiltes Leid 1«, the start of a trilogy, the second chapter of which followed in 2004 and the third in 2012. With »Herz« (2017) and »Emuna«, which will be released in March 2020, Pelham shows that he plays in his own Champions League in German Rap & HipHop. He simply is »a living legend«. There is no one else who does such a unique job. For the annual committee: Manfred Gillig-Degrave
The certificate of honour was presented on 28th February 2020 as part of a the presse release date of the album »Emuna« at the SoHo House Berlin.