Léonie Sonning Music Prize 2021

The Korean composer Unsuk Chin awarded the Léonie Sonning Music Prize 2021
The composer Unsuk Chin receives the Léonie Sonning Music Prize 2021 at a concert on June 5, 2021 at the DR Concert Hall. Léonie Sonning Music Prize amounts to EUR 100,000. The prize concert will be the main event of a mini festival with music by Unsuk Chin in Copenhagen: On 30 May 2021 The Royal Danish Academy of Music will host a master class for composer students, and on 31 May the Academy will host a chamber concert performed by students and teachers from RDAM.

Born in Seoul in 1961, Unsuk Chin taught herself to play piano at an early age. After studying composition in South Korea and winning several international prizes, she moved to Hamburg in 1985 to study with Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Since 1988 she has lived in Berlin.

As a composer, Unsuk Chin has received numerous prestigious awards, and her works are performed throughout the world. In this connection, she has worked with conductors such as Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano and Leif Segerstam and her music has been performed by orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In the 2019/20 season, Unsuk Chin is a Composer in Residence at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, with fourteen works programmed. Unsuk Chin visited Copenhagen in 2018, where she was a Composer-in-Residence at the PULSAR festival at The Royal Danish Music Conservatory.

The 58-year-old Korean will be the 17th composer to receive the Léonie Sonning Music Prize, which will be raised to DKK 1,000,000 from 2021. Among the former composers we find Stravinsky (1959), Benjamin Britten (1968), Dmitri Shostakovich (1973), Olivier Messiaen (1977), Pierre Boulez (1985), Per Nørgaard (1996), Thomas Adés (2015), Hans Abrahamsen (2019) and finally György Ligeti (1990), whom Unsuk Chin studied with in Hamburg.

Read more about the Leónie Sonning Music Prize