Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner
The winners of the 2014 Gilmore Young Artist Award are 19-year-old Curtis Institute of Music graduate Andrew Hsu and 16-year-old Juilliard School student Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner. Both pianists receive a $15,000 stipend, as well as $10,000 to commission a new piano composition for which the artist will have exclusive performance rights for one year.
The Award
The Gilmore Young Artist Award is presented every two years to single out the most promising of the new generation of U.S. pianists, age 22 and younger. Nominations are made by music professionals from around the world, and an anonymous selection committee evaluates the nominees over a period of time. In 1989, trustees of the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation of Kalamazoo, Michigan, announced plans to honor the memory of Irving S. Gilmore, a local businessman and philanthropist, by creating some of the most unique and significant awards for pianists anywhere in the world and a biennial piano festival to celebrate keyboard music. Since 1990, 30 pianists have been recognized as Gilmore Young Artists.
The winners
Committed to social action through music, Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner (the youngest musician to graduate from Juilliard), has received special honors including being selected by CNN International as ‘Connector of the Day’ for his humanitarian contributions, a 2011 CNN Heroes nomination, and performing in President Obama’s re-election inaugural concert at the Kennedy Center in 2013. In 2010, Sanchez-Werner became the first American soloist to perform with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. While there, he launched a fundraising drive to create the first Children’s Cancer Clinic in Iraq.
Hsu has garnered recognition, both for his playing and his compositions, winning top prizes in the Russian International Music Competition’s ‘Most Promising Young Talent,’ the Menuhin-Dowling Young Musician’s Competition and the Pacific Musical Society‘s annual competition in San Francisco. He was the youngest recipient of the William Schuman Prize in the 2012 BMI Student Composer’s Awards, and he is a four-time recipient of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Award. He is currently a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center.
