The guitarist Juan Manuel Cañizares and the composer Eduardo Soutullo have been awarded the National Music Award in the categories of Interpretation and Composition respectively.
The jury of the prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Sports and endowed with 30,000 euros, has proposed Cañizares in the Interpretation modality for "the interpretive ability to unite different stylistic traditions with the guitar, breaking barriers between classical music and flamenco , and also for the international dissemination of the Spanish guitar", according to the statement published on Monday.
For his part, the prize to Soutullo has been awarded for "the unanimous international recognition of his music, especially his orchestral production, in which the premiere in 2022 in Saint Petersburg of his cantata El lamento de los girasoles stands out ".
Guitarist, composer and pedagogue, Cañizares has more than 40 years of career since he started playing music at the conservatory of music in Sabadell, the city where he was born in 1966. Thus began a career in which he has moved indiscriminately through the flamenco repertoire and classical, and was the first and only flamenco guitarist invited by the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom he performed the Aranjuez Concert at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
A professor at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (Esmuc) since 2003, Cañizares has collaborated with the world's leading orchestras, such as the Staatskapelle Dresden, the NHK Symphony or the Barcelona and Nacional de Catalunya Symphony.
Equally valuable are the collaborations with artists such as Paco de Lucía, with whom he maintained a close relationship for ten years, and with artists of the caliber of Enrique Morente, Camarón, Serrat, Peter Gabriel or Leo Brouwer.
In the composition section, the works for the National Ballet of Spain and the soundtracks for films such as La Lola se va a los puertos (1993), Flamenco (1996) or La Jota (2016) stand out.
His career, which has led him to collaborate on more than 100 albums in addition to publishing 15 of his own, has earned him recognition such as the National Guitar Award in 1982, the Music Award in 2008 and Flamenco Hoy in the years 2000, 2011 and 2013.
Composer Eduardo Soutullo (Vigo, 1968) began his training at the Vigo Conservatory of Music to continue it in Madrid and Paris. Doctor from the University of Vigo, he is a professor at the Superior Conservatory of Music of Santiago de Compostela. He has received numerous awards, the latest being first prize at the 2018 Croatian New Note Composition Competition.
