Nominations announced for the 2024 Ivors Classical Awards

Jonathan Dove: Itch – Adam Temple Smith as Itch and Victoria Simmonds as Watkins – Opera Holland Park 2023 (Photo: Craig Fuller)

Celebrating the best new classical music and sound art, this year’s Ivors Classical Awards take place at BFI Southbank on 12 November 2024 when 11 Ivor Novello Awards will be presented to eight category winners and three Gift of the Academy award winners. BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the ceremony on Saturday 16 November in a special edition of the New Music Show.

The Ivors Academy has announced the 36 composers who have been nominated for this year’s awards. The shortlist features 10 first-time nominees – Amy Bryce, Benjamin Tassie [for A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time, see my review of the recording], Cassandra Miller, Jane Stanley, Lawrence Dunn, Lisa Illean, Rufus Isabel Elliot, Rūta Vitkauskaitė, Ryan Latimer and Soosan Lolavar. 

Amongst previous winners, the shortlist also features works by Sir George Benjamin (recipient of the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection in 2022), Matthew Herbert (recipient of the Ivor Novello Award for Innovation in 2023) and Jonathan Dove (recipient of The Ivors Classical Music Award in 2008) who is nominated this year for his opera Itch [see my review]. Whilst Julian Anderson, Cassandra Miller and Laurence Osborn have all been nominated twice.

Subject matter and themes in the works go well beyond the traditional. Two works focus on sexuality and queer communities, Julian Anderson’s ECHOES, which was commissioned for Classical Pride, and Philip Venables’ music theatre piece The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions. Hannah Conway’s FLY/WORK/GROW highlights the devastating impact of temporary accommodation and homelessness has on child health and development, whilst Bushra El-Turk’s opera Woman at Point Zero is based on the 1975 novel of the same name by the Egyptian feminist and activist Nawal El Saadawi [see my interview with Bushra El-Turk, talking about the opera].

Gavin Higgins: Horn Concerto, London premiere – Ben Goldscheider, Gavin Higgins, Christopher Warren Green, London Chamber Orchestra (Photo: Jerome Weatherald)

Nature and climate change is another perennial theme. Works highlighting our relationship with our planet, nature and the changes we are facing as humans include Christian Mason’s environmental cantata The Singing Tree, Gavin Higgins’ Horn Concerto, which celebrates his relationship with forests and love of woodlands [see my review of the London premiere] and Tiding II (silentium) by Lisa Illean which focusses on the ocean. Other works inspired by the ocean and water are Benjamin Tassie’s A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time, Dan Jones’ Each Tiny Drop and Duncan MacLeod’s Orasaigh.

Full details from the Ivors Academy website.