Composer Tõnu Kõrvits receives the Lepo Sumera Award

The joint award by the Estonian Society of Authors and Estonian Composers’ Union – Lepo Sumera Award for a musical work – was unanimously handed by the jury to Tõnu Kõrvits in Pärnu Concert Hall at Pärnu Music Festival on August 8th, 2018. 

Lepo Sumera Award is to acknowledge and promote the elaborated development in artistic style, extensive scope of musical thinking and artistic depth in a musician’s work. 

The members of current jury are as follows: conductor Paavo Järvi, composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, musicologist Kerri Kotta and electronic musician Tammo Sumera.

Tõnu Kõrvits has entered the scene of Estonian music in a modest and natural pace as well as acquired his personal style almost unnoticably. Kõrvits is a composer who is drifting along the bypaths, who silently and undetectably strolls in the back rooms of Estonian mentality, often far from places where fierce debates are held and aesthetic paradigmas are being clashed. He has the ability to notice the important as well as to bring this to the audience with a poetic clarity. The aesthetics of his mildly uncompromised naturalness has also passed into the musical work of Kõrvits’s students; therefore, one can emphasize the emergence of the new school, the New Sincerity in Estonian music. 

Head of jury Paavi Järvi has also recorded all Lepo Sumera’s symphonies. “Lepo Sumera was always fascinating to be around. I repeatedly witnessed how he could create an idea from a single sentence or impulse which he then would immediately start to develop. The years of working with him and recording his music taught me a lot. I felt that already back then Sumera was already an important part of Estonian contemporary music history,” Järvi recalls.

The candidates for the Lepo Sumera Award were proposed by the jury members. The laureate was chosen during the discussion held by the jury. 

The Award includes the monetary award of 4500 EUR by the Estonian Society of Authors and Estonian Composers’ Union.