Michala Petri receive Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Honorary Award.
Today six recipients of The Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Honorary Award 2025 were announced. OUR Recordings wishes their artist, Michala Petri and the five other recipients of the Honorary Award the warmest congratulations!.
The six outstanding Danish artists will each receive Denmark’s largest honorary award of 1,000,000 DKK. The composers Kirstine Lindemann, Signe Lykke, and Bára Gísladóttir; the musicians Bjarke Mogensen and Michala Petri; and the singer Stephen Milling.
About the Foundation:
Carl Nielsen is undoubtedly the Danish composer who has achieved the widest international acclaim in the classical music world through his symphonies and chamber music. Having composed approximately 300 songs, he is also known to the Danish public as a major contributor to the unique Danish song treasury.
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen was the most significant female sculptor in Danish history, with a large production and often working abroad. She was the first female sculptor in the world to receive a commission to build an equestrian statue of a king.
In 1957 the couples two daughters, Irmelin Eggert Møller and Anne Marie Telmanyi, established "Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsens Foundation" in memory of their parents. The capital of the foundation is primarily established on basis on the income from the artists rights. Each year, the foundation grants honorary awards to Danish sculptors, composers, and musicians, alternating between even and odd years. In addition to the honorary awards, the foundation also distributes talent prizes and supports projects that highlight the artistic contributions of Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen.
For more information, visit: www.nielsen-legat.dk.
Motivations by professor in viola and chamber music Tim Frederiksen:
Michala Petri
“Michala Petri is a living legend. For half a century she has been the leading soloist on her instrument, the recorder. With extraordinary virtuosity and personal musicality, she has set a standard for the recorder which has greatly inspired many musicians in both baroque and contemporary music, as well as having performed with many internationally renowned artists.”
Bjarke Mogensen
“Musicality is paramount when Bjarke Mogensen takes the stage with his instrument, the accordion. Whether performing as a soloist in a newly composed work, delivered with passionate, engaging commitment, or playing a delicate sonata by Scarlatti, where just a few measures convince you that it was originally written for the instrument, his deeply felt interpretation, full of character and personality, captures the essence of the music.”
BACH with cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen is DANISH ALBUM OF THE YEAR in Politiken.
Thank you to Thomas Michelsen, and a HUGE congratulations to Henrik Dam Thomsen and producer Mikkel Nymand, as well as to the Beckett Foundation, without whose support this recording would not have been possible.
"The Strongest Danish Performance of the Year:
It was a solo album: classical music for cello recorded by Henrik Dam Thomsen. The principal cellist of the DR Symphony Orchestra has been working to find the perfect interpretation of Bach's six famous cello suites since he was ten years old.
This year, he recorded them and even produced a video in the TikTok-promoted yellow brick cathedral of Grundtvig's Church. However, it is the album itself, the sound of the cello in perfect acoustics, namely the baroque wooden space of Garnisons Church, which is a much better church for the purpose, that truly stands out.
Henrik Dam Thomsen plays the six suites with introspective dreaminess. Expressive and with an extremely elegant sense of how the music can unfold, it seems to both speak and think at the same time.
The album, which I awarded six hearts, is not without Danish competitors. While Dam Thomsen’s release marked his passing of the age of 50, Trio con Brio marked their 25th anniversary as an ensemble with music by Schubert and Weinberg on The Passenger.
But Bach's suites, in a recording that has since been chosen as Editor’s Choice by the esteemed Gramophone magazine and nominated for an International Classical Music Award, must be considered this year’s Danish album of the year".
