Belmont-Preis 2020
for Contemporary Music
Florian Weber
Pianist and composer
Osnabrück and New York
www.florianweber.net
Statement from the Board of Trustees
Florian Weber is one of the major innovators in contemporary music.
His musical frame of reference is seemingly inexhaustible: it extends from Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schönberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen to Lee Konitz, John Taylor and Paul Bley and even includes so-called world music.
His playing is as limitless in its possibilities as it is economic and focused. Instead of post-modernist gestures he works with the substance of the music itself. His playing neither avoids nor flaunts risk and quite naturally projects a sense of unparalleled freedom. Working with elementary musical ideas, a tiny rhythmic or harmonic ‘building block’, he is able to generate unexpected epiphanies in which the material, charged with new intensity, unveils its utopian potential.
