Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Nasty, brutish and brilliant

Plus: a glorious 80th birthday concert at Cafe Oto for an unsung hero of British music

issue 26 January 2019

If you take awards seriously (which of course you shouldn’t) you could argue that Rebecca Saunders is now Britain’s most important living composer. Last week she won music’s Nobel, the Ernst von Siemens prize. €250,000. And its record is pretty good — if you ignore 1974 (Britten) and 1987 (Bernstein).

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