Innovation Award
Honouring forward-thinking projects from around the world
About the Award
The Classical:NEXT Innovation Award highlights groundbreaking projects that are shaping the future of classical music worldwide. It celebrates individuals and initiatives that drive progress through bold, yet thoughtful and effective, experimentation in ideas, planning, and action.
A dedicated Nominating Committee, composed of esteemed journalists and an industry expert, ensures a broad international perspective by identifying outstanding projects beyond national and professional boundaries. Each committee member nominates initiatives from their home country, along with one international project, to create an initial longlist. The committee then votes on these nominations, refining the selection to a shortlist of ten. The final recipients are determined through an online vote by all registered Classical:NEXT delegates.
Each year, three recipients are honoured at the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award Ceremony. The 2025 edition will take place on Wednesday, 14 May, in Berlin.
2025 Short List
Clásica No Convencional (Chile)
Clásica No Convencional (CNC) is a series of classical music concerts that take place in unconventional spaces, such as an abandoned warehouse in an industrial area that is being converted into a residential area or an underground parking lot. These are areas where there is no artistic programming and are more than four kilometers away from the nearest cultural center. They are not simplified concerts, for example, of movements of works, but of complete works, and they combine some hits from the repertoire with challenging languages of the 20th century. The staging is immersive and is designed for people who are not yet classical music audiences, with immersive lighting, projections and aromatic coloured vapors, and there is also a cocktail bar, finger food, bookstores, record stores and record labels, as well as works by contemporary Chilean visual artists on display. In just one year, they have exceeded 6,000 attendees in six concerts, half of them free and the other half paid, and they also always do an educational function for schoolchildren. The team behind the project is multidisciplinary and one of its leaders is the most charismatic Chilean conductor, Paolo Bortolameolli (1982), who has conducted more than 60 orchestras around the world and will take over the leadership of the Teatro Municipal de Santiago, Chile’s main opera house, in 2026.
Reason for nomination
At a time when the traditional classical music audience is not rapidly renewing in Chile’s traditional epicentres, whose programming is usually very conservative, the Ciclo Clásica No Convencional (CNC) has achieved a significant change in just one year. Its first concert was in January 2024 and it started with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, incorporating from the second concert, in April, works such as Messiaen’s Apparition de l’Église Éternelle and La Colombe, contrasted by the way with Bach, and achieving the same effect as a rock concert, without formalities in the costumes and with explanations that surprised an audience that, for the most part, had never been to a classical music concert. The free invitations were running out more and more quickly, and the repertoire was refined, balancing pieces by Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla with Vivaldi and Albinoni’s Adagio, or arias by Puccini with Respighi’s Gli Uccelli, to arrive at Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Mahler’s Adagietto and Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in December. The change from free to paid admission did not reduce the audience, which was always made up of people from diverse socioeconomic conditions and cultural backgrounds, with many residents of these artistically abandoned geographic areas where the events are held, until the critics themselves echoed this initiative, rewarding it.
People attracted by the concept of an immersive show or by the adventure of seeing what happens in an unconventional space in a sector of the city that they don’t know, lovers of the visual arts, entire families of students who had gone first to an educational performance, and came back with their parents, the audience has been growing ever larger, and this has been possible without harming the artistic excellence in terms of repertoire and performers, with the participation of soloists and the Solístico de Santiago orchestra, which has 50% women members, the local star conductor Paolo Bortolameolli and also the gradual incorporation of young female students of orchestral conducting as guests. Clásica No Convencional has also managed to conquer the private world, from big businessmen to advertising agency experts – who in Chile do not usually listen to classical music or go to concerts – obtaining sponsorships that will allow it to continue with the concerts during the year 2025: the first of them will be outdoors and free, in March, with works by Bach, Elgar and Bartók.
The Augmented Orchestra (United States)
The Augmented Orchestra (AO) is a technology created, developed and implemented by the composer Anna Clyne and sound designer Jody Elff. The idea is to expand upon an acoustic orchestra: to integrate contemporary audio technologies to the traditional orchestral model. Not a playback-with-orchestra model, and not looping or amplification, but rather a true merging of current sound manipulation tools with the long established sound world of the symphony orchestra.
They say: “Examples of AO processes are pitching shifting double basses down an octave to create an organ-like quality, running clarinets through distortion to emulate the sound of electric guitars, and adding harmonic clouds to flutes so that they hover above the orchestra long after they stop playing.” So why not just use an organ and electric guitars? It is because the quality of the sound is different – it is a completely new sonority, which is what drew Anna and Jody to this sonic exploration from the very start.
The Augmented Orchestra was first used in the world premiere of Anna’s Wild Geese, with conductor Cristian Mӑcelaru, at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2023. The Augmented Orchestra has since featured in Anna’s The Gorgeous Nothings, premiered at the BBC Proms in August 2024 with the Swingles Singers and BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, with Nicholas Collon conducting. AO also features in Anna’s PALETTE, to be premiered by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra in February 2025.
Reason for nomination
The effect of this ‘augmented’ technology has made a real impact and has the potential to extend the composer’s range of sonic possibilities and can encourage others to think similarly outside the box, perhaps stimulating other new ways of developing the available sonorities into something that speaks widely to 21st-century ears.
SONORA Music (Poland)
SONORA music was founded over a decade ago by Stanisław Suchora and Mikołaj Bylka-Kanecki. Recently, the agency merged with Malke Music Management, becoming a leading player in the classical and early music markets in Poland and Central Europe. The agency currently represents 19 classical artists, including Linus Roth, Annelien Van Wauwe, Thomas Sanderling, Nils Mönkemeyer, Bartosz Koziak, Marc Korovitch, Ana de la Vega, Marcin Świątkiewicz, and composer Elżbieta Sikora. It collaborates with ensembles such as Arte dei Suonatori, the Polish Radio Choir, and the Equilibrium String Quartet.
SONORA has organised tours for ensembles such as Cameristi della Scala, the Slovenian RTV Orchestra, the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, the Collegium Musicale Chamber Choir, the NFM Leopoldinum, the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra, the Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra, and the Robert-Schumann-Philharmonie Chemnitz. The agency was also responsible for the international tour of the Laureates of the 16th Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Poznań, and collaborated with the Slovenian art collective Laibach on special projects. SONORA is also involved in organizing festivals, such as the All’improvviso International Festival of Early Music in Gliwice.
In the coming seasons, SONORA has projects planned with partners such as the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the Freiburger Barockorchester, the Montenegrin Symphony Orchestra, the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Szczecin Philharmonic, Bozar Brussels, Seoul Arts Center, National Forum of Music, Eufonie Festival, Misteria Paschalia Festival in Kraków, Brandenburgische Sommerkonzerte, Pražské jaro, Stockholm Early Music Festival, and Reykjavik Early Music Festival. SONORA was created to initiate dialogue and foster engagement between different communities, cultures, and generations. It enables the realization of ambitious projects with the highest artistic standards, while also fostering and promoting innovative musical phenomena.
Reason for nomination
From sublime early music concerts to crazy conceptual contemporary music projects; from a world tour of international competition winners to a multimedia show by the legendary Slovenian band Laibach. Operating on the Polish and international music market for more than a decade, the artistic agency SONORA music not only represents internationally the most talented musicians of different origins and generations, but also constantly surprises and inspires with unconventional ideas whose common denominator is high artistic value and originality.
Black Orchestral Network (United States)
The Black Orchestral Network (BON) is a national organisation that advocates for Black orchestra musicians in the USA. One of its goals is to increase the number of Black musicians who are offered tenured positions in American orchestras. Recently, groups including the Cincinnati Symphony (Ohio) and the Charlotte Symphony (North Carolina) have acted on the BON’s recommendations as they created labor agreements with provisions aimed at increasing diversity. The organisation, founded in 2022, also works to publish data about diversity in orchestras, and helps to foster connections among Black musicians.
Reason for nomination
The Black Orchestral Network is working to make American orchestras a more welcoming environment for people who have historically felt excluded from the art form. In just a few years’ time, it has shown some tangible results in the ways orchestras are turning to the organisation for input and advice.
No Limits (Hong Kong, China, SAR) (China)
No Limits, jointly presented by the Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, promotes inclusion in the arts through its annual series (presented in tandem with the HK Arts Festival) featuring outstanding artists with diverse abilities from around the world. Showcasing differently abled artists from Hong Kong and Mainland China as well as the US and UK, the 2025 series features 11 empowering works spanning a broad range of classical and contemporary art forms, including a site-specific community dance program where professional dancers and a group of visually impaired community members explore fashion, personal identity and the relationship between caregivers and care recipients.
Reason for nomination
For a city where physical accessibility was slow to appear in public spaces, Hong Kong has made great strides in removing barriers for its performing artists through the pioneering No Limits, reinforcing its message of social inclusion not just by wielding English verbal and visual vocabularies of empowerment (and establishing comparable verbiage in Chinese and Chinese Sign Language) but also in presenting artists who defy personal boundaries and constraints in sharing a broad range of artistically enriching programming. In its seven seasons, No Limits has provided a unique platform for more than 50 international performances in Hong Kong and created meaningful exchanges with local performers and audiences–in the case of classical music, by augmenting performances both with braille annotations and CSL interpretations.
OPERA APERTA (Ukraine)
OPERA APERTA is the laboratory of contemporary opera in Kyiv, founded by Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. The showcase performance of the Opera House was the archeological opera Chornobyldorf, created and presented in 2020. Opera Aperta is continuously searching and testing new styles of contemporary music, compositional and instrumental theater, media opera, performative and interdisciplinary practices and has already won international recognition.
Reason for nomination
OPERA APERTA is one of the most interesting production houses in the contemporary opera ecosystem. Their works combine interesting ideas and unique artistic language, with their operas making strong impressions in the last 5 to 10 years. OPERA APERTA is a moving force, inspiring changes in the Ukrainian operatic scene.
Festival Divertimento (Mexico)
Festival Divertimento is a private initiative, with no government funding, that regularly organises and presents chamber music concerts to the public, free of charge and in different venues in the city. The artists are all professional and contribute with their experience and enthusiasm to this project, which unlike many other initiatives, has managed to exist since 2015; 2025 is, in fact, its tenth year. Its programming is agreed upon with the musicians and includes not only European and American chamber music (written for a wide variety of instruments) but Latin American and particularly Mexican contemporary chamber music.
Reason for nomination
Divertimento has managed to attract an audience for chamber music most successfully, without any official support, and is a source of motivation for musicians who wish to expand their repertoire and area of performances. It is also very generous in outreach for its concerts can be seen in youtube.
Música en México are a small family of musicians that deserve recognition for their untiring and welcome efforts of bringing music to a wider audience, at the same time widening professional musicians’ scope of activities and exposure.
Prison Yard Festival, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong) (China)
Tai Kwun, Hong Kong’s decommissioned Central Police Station compound, reopened in spring 2018 as a non-governmental venue (cited by UNESCO in 2019) dually devoted to heritage conservation and cutting-edge artistic creation. The Prison Yard Festival (est. 2023), created in Tai Kwun’s spirit of repurposing historic spaces, reinvents the iconic courtyard where felons were once granted exercise privileges into a forward-thinking concert space focused on erasing cultural barriers, with each season hosting an international resident ensemble setting a theme for additional interactions with Hong Kong’s young professional musicians. (West-East Divan Ensemble, 2023; Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2024)
Reason for nomination
In Hong Kong, where the local government is the main presenter of classical music and holds a near-monopoly of the city’s venues, Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard Festival (through the support of the Hong Kong Jockey Club) has instilled and encouraged an ethos of open thought and cultural exchange where visiting artists have performed and engaged in public discussions with audiences and local musicians, including traditional instrumentalists from China, South Asia and the Gulf Region. In a political environment where firm reins apply not just to current artistic expression but also officially sanctioned history, the Prison Yard Festival (in its three years to date) has managed to fit classical music precisely within the institution’s stated goals of historic discovery and contemporary relevance.
Breath Cycle (United Kingdom)
Scottish Opera’s Breath Cycle has been around since 2013. It began life as a collaboration between the opera company and Glasgow’s Gartnavel General Hospital Cystic Fibrosis Service to explore whether classical singing techniques might help the wellbeing of cystic fibrosis sufferers. Since 2021, however, it has been broadened to engage with sufferers from a range of conditions affecting lung health, especially Long Covid. Bringing together composer Gareth Williams (a former Scottish Opera composer in residence) and writer Martin O’Connor, the project both offered vocal guidance to participants – in terms of singing, vocal exercises and breathing techniques – and also drew on their experiences in songwriting workshops. These workshop sessions were made in collaboration with consultants from the NHS. Following several iterations of the workshops, the newly composed songs were drawn together in a ‘Covid Composers Songbook’. In January and February 2025, the project transformed into a live public event with performances of a selection of these songs by Williams, O’Connor and other Scottish performers.
Reason for nomination
This is a long-term project that has evolved to accommodate new needs and challenges – especially the long-term effects of the Covid pandemic in this case. It has involved health professionals in exploring the therapeutic effects of singing, vocal and breath work on lung conditions, and it has unfolded over a number of different platforms – both online and real-world – culminating in a more traditional live performance. It has directly addressed, and responded to, a critical contemporary issue, and it has harnessed artistic and musical means to address its challenges, in the process also becoming a forum for individuals’ responses to their personal health challenges. By the time the Breath Cycle reached its 2025 live performances, it had involved teaching, workshops, online resources, participant involvement and finally the creation of a new live performance.
OPEROMANIJA (Lithuania)
Operomanija is a production house based in Lithuania, dedicated to the creation and promotion of new music theatre through diverse cross-disciplinary artistic collaborations. Since its formation in 2008, it has produced about 60 contemporary operas and various multidisciplinary art projects. The organisation runs the Contemporary Opera Festival NOA (New Opera Action) – one of the leading international new music theatre events in the Baltic region. It also holds creative residencies related to contemporary opera, organises productions and releases of sound recordings, along with national and international promotion of produced works.
Reason for nomination
The production house of OPERAMANIJA has irreversibly changed the field of contemporary opera and contemporary musical theatre not only in Lithuania, but in the whole region. Operomanija-produced works have consistently won international competitions and continue to catalyse the renewal of contemporary musical theatre on the international scale.
2025 Nominating Committee
Monika Pasiecznik (Poland)
Music Critic, Researcher, Curator
Monika Pasiecznik is a music critic, researcher and curator working with Polish and international music media and festivals. Author of several books and hundreds of articles on classical, new and experimental music. Juror of international composition competitions, academic lecturer. Curator of experimental music projects. She lives in Warsaw. Read more of her work on her website.
Mauricio Peña Cediel (Colombia)
Artist Manager
Mauricio has worked as executive director of the Bogota Philharmonic Orchestra, as head of music of Bogota’s Culture, Recreation and Sports Bureau, as artistic administrator for the Colombian National Symphony Orchestra, and as head of Banco de la República’s music division. He now directs MPC Music Management, providing artist management, booking, consulting and production services.
Rudolph Tang (China)
Music Critic
Award-winning music critic Rudolph Tang, based in Shanghai, has been described by The New York Times as a “writer and expert on the classical music industry in China.” Throughout his career, Rudolph has dedicated himself to music journalism and criticism. His extensive press trips have taken him to over 100 destinations across more than 35 countries, covering premieres, festivals, and competitions. As one of the most quoted and widely published critics of his generation, Rudolph contributes in English to Musical America, Interlude.hk, VAN, das Orchester, Operawire, and Symphony. In 2024, he was honoured with the Pioneering Critic Award by Music Lover magazine.
Lorena Jiménez Alonso (Spain)
Musicologist
Lorena Jiménez is a musicologist, classical music journalist and PR manager. Her interviews and articles have appeared in magazines such as Ritmo, Audioclásica, Pro Ópera and La Scena Musicale. Also, Lorena hosts a series of exclusive interviews with world-class artists at the Granada Festival. She has a degree in Musicology from the University of Oviedo and a Master’s in Arts Administration from the University of Dresden.
Jessica Duchen (United Kingdom)
Music Critic, Author, Librettist
Jessica Duchen is a music critic, author and librettist. She contributes to The Sunday Times, The I and BBC Music Magazine, and her libretti include Roxanna Panufnik’s Silver Birch, shortlisted for an International Opera Award in 2018. Her latest book is the novel Immortal, about Beethoven’s ‘immortal beloved’.
Harriet Cunningham (Australia)
Researcher
Harriet Cunningham is a freelance writer and researcher based in Sydney, Australia. In print, she is best known as one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s music and theatre critics. She is addicted to listening and thinking about live music – any kind of live performance, in fact. She has been known to play the violin.
Romina de la Sotta (Chile)
Journalist
A Chilean journalist covering classical music since 2001, Romina de la Sotta has written in newspapers and in Resonancias, the musicological research journal of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She worked as Radio Beethoven’s journalist between 2002 and 2008 and again from 2020 to the present. He has interviewed hundreds of composers, performers and conductors from Chile and around the world.
Ken Smith (China)
Journalist
Ken Smith has covered the arts in Asia for more than two decades for the Financial Times and Opera magazine, among other media. A winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for distinguished music writing, he is also the winner of the 2020 SOPA award for excellence in arts and culture reporting.
René Solis Brun (Mexico)
Publisher
Born in Mexico, René Solís Brun graduated with an MBA from Harvard in 1958. He worked in the manufacturing and retail sectors before joining the publishing sector. He worked first in magazines, then books and now with digital platforms/newsletters/online radio in Spanish, all free access and dedicated to widening classical music appreciation and horizons. He founded musicamexico.com.mx eight and a half years ago. He has been a music aficionado all his life and has attended several Classical:NEXT events.
David Kettle (United Kingdom)
Journalist
David Kettle is a journalist and writer on music based in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a particular interest in contemporary music. He is a music critic for The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph and The Strad, and writes widely across numerous other publications.
Brian Wise (United States)
Journalist, Producer, Editor
Brian Wise is a journalist, producer and editor based in New York. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC Music Magazine and MusicalAmerica.com. He is the producer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s national radio series. He is also the editor of Overtones, the Curtis Institute of Music’s magazine, and is a contributing editor to Strings.
Rasa Murauskaitė-Juškienė (Lithuania)
Senior Editor
Rasa Murauskaitė-Juškienė is a music critic and cultural journalist who currently works as a senior editor at LRT KLASIKA radio. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Rasa has published over 400 articles on music and culture, produces radio programmes focusing on contemporary Lithuanian and Baltic music, and works as a producer on various radio projects, both nationally and internationally.
Steve Long (United Kingdom)
Industry Expert
An industry veteran with over 30 years experience in the classical music recording business, Steve Long works in recording, production and label management.
2024 Recipients
The Sound Voice Project (UK)
A remarkable project that seeks to connect with people who have lost or are losing the use of their voices due to medical illnesses such as laryngeal cancer, Motor Neurone Disease and Parkinson’s Disease, bringing together unique interdisciplinary collaborations with professionals in healthcare, biomedical research and technology. Led by composer Hannah Conway, working with librettist Hazel Gould, The Sound Voice Project platforms voices and narratives rarely given the stage. An immersive opera-video installation and live concert performed by people who have experienced voice loss, appearing together on stage with the professional singers, who include Roderick Williams, Lucy Crowe and Gweneth Ann Rand was shown at Kings Place and the Aldeburgh Festival last year and the project continues to develop, with the new immersive sound installation 100 VOICES touring public spaces and hospitals in 2024.
Extensión Usach (Chile)
The Extension Department of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Usach) is in charge of designing a rich cultural program whose heart is in art music. They have an annual season with 50 free concerts, with an average of 360 attendees per concert and an audience growth rate of 5.9%. This university does not teach composition or musical performance, but it has five stable professional casts: three choirs, one of the oldest early music ensembles in the country, with 45 years of experience (Syntagma Musicum), and the orchestra that performs the most premieres of Chilean contemporary music in the country (Orquesta Usach), which is 41 years old.
In addition to free concerts in their hall, which is the one with the best natural acoustics in the city (Aula Magna Usach), they offer free concerts in the most deprived and peripheral sectors of a city with more than 5,600,000 inhabitants that is characterized by territorial inequality.
They perform all repertoires, from the Renaissance to contemporary music: they offered, for example, the premiere in modern times of the zarzuela “Destinos vencen finezas” (1698) by Juan de Navas, and now they offer the world premiere of “Despedida”, a symphonic choral work by Miguel Farías, today the Chilean composer of greatest global significance, whose works have recently been premiered by Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic and San Diego Symphony. They also have a label that has published 23 albums of Chilean classical music in four years, and three radio shows.
Gateways Music Festival (USA)
Founded in 1993, the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra brings together professional classical musicians of African descent from across the North America, providing a sense of community for participants while helping to mentor and inspire younger generations of black musicians. Though long based at the Eastman School of Music in upstate New York, it has a rapidly growing national presence, with performances this season at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington and Chicago’s Symphony Center. Its touring programmes are fresh and engaging, whether performing Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale alongside Wynton Marsalis’ A Fiddler’s Tale or juxtaposing a world premiere by Jon Batiste with works by Florence Price and Johannes Brahms.
Roger Wilson, Director of Operations and Co-Founder of Black Lives in Music, received the Award on behalf of the Gateways Music Festival.
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