Peter Sellars
The 2014 Polar Music Prize will be awarded to two Americans: Peter Sellars, the American opera and theatre director, and Chuck Berry, rock ‘n’ roll singer. Both laureates will be presented with their prizes by King Carl XVI of Sweden at a gala ceremony in Stockholm’s Concert Hall on 26 August. The Polar Music Prize celebrates this year its 25 anniversary.
The Jury Citation for Peter Sellars reads: « The Polar Music Prize 2014 is awarded to Peter Sellars from Pittsburgh, USA. The director Peter Sellars is a living definition of what the Polar Music Prize is all about: highlighting the music and presenting it in a new context. With his controversial productions of opera and theatre, Peter Sellars has depicted everything from war and famine to religion and globalisation. Sellars has set Mozart in the luxury of Trump Tower and in the drug trade of Spanish Harlem, turned Nixon’s visit to China into opera and set Kafka’s obsession with home cleanliness to music. Peter Sellars shows us that classical music is not about dusty sheet music and metronomic precision, but that classical music, with its violent power and complexity, has fundamentally always been and will continue to be a way of reflecting and depicting the world. »
