Special Prize

20th century composers

Offered by the Fondation André Boucourechliev, under the aegis of the Fondation de France.

The candidates will be free to choose a piece among the entire work of the composer.

In 2001, Jeanne Boucourechliev turned to the Fondation de France to create the André Boucourechliev Foundation as a tribute to her husband, a French composer of Bulgarian origin, born on 28 July 1925 in Sofia (Bulgaria) and died on 13 November 1997 in Paris.

Boucourechliev’s piece, striking for their diversity, has aroused the creation of an Association of friends, researchers and musicians that assumes the establishment, dissemination and protection of musical or literary works of Boucourechliev, a Foundation that promotes the work of the musician by subsidizing certain executions and who, on the other hand, awards each year a composition prize with a purse of € 8,000 maximum.

André Boucourechliev © DR

ANDRÉ BOUCOURECHLIEV, FRENCH COMPOSER (1925-1997)

Boucourechliev is the first at the French school of Sofia and studied piano before going to the Sofia Academy of Music in 1946. He began a career as a virtuoso pianist and in 1948 won the Grand Prix of the National Competition for Musical Performance. Boucourechliev began to compose, following a path that he described as “self-taught and against the backdrop of history”. He writes for instruments simultaneously (Music for Three, 1957, Piano Sonata, 1959) and for tape, during two stays in Milan, at the Studio di fonologia of the RAI, then at the music research group of the ORTF . On the initiative of Pierre Boulez, the first works of Boucourechliev were created at the Musical Domain as well as in Darmstadt. Boucourechliev is best illustrated by his open works, including the Archipelago for various courses which earned him international fame (Archipel I to IV, 1967 to 1970). These are moving works, which vary from one execution to the next according to the free and instantaneous choices of the performers. Boucourechliev also uses the open form, in the Six Studies after Piranèse (1975). “Music writer” as he liked to define himself, he published, among others, books on Schumann, Beethoven, Debussy, Wagner, and a large monograph on Stravinsky. Boucourechliev synthesized his research and his reflections on musical aesthetics in Le Langage musical (Fayard, 1993).

Laureates:

2006 – Ermis Theodorakis (Greece)
2008 – Antal Sporck (Netherlands)
2010 – Ning Yu (China)
2012 – Hayk Melikyan (Armenia)
2014 – Aline Piboule (France)
2016 – Vitaliy Kyianytsia (Ukraine)
2018 – Jahye Euh (South Korea)
2020 – Robert Fleitz (United States)
2022 – Hristeya Markova (Bulgaria)

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