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Critics’ Circle Honours Uchida and Emerging Artists
Lifetime achievement shares the spotlight with new talent.
Mitsuko Uchida has received the lifetime achievement honour at the Critics’ Circle Music Awards, in a celebration that also recognised new opera, emerging performers and the work of an early-music ensemble.
The ceremony, held at English National Opera, presented awards for 2025. Its combination of established and developing artists connected recognition for a distinguished international career with support for musicians at an earlier stage.
English National Opera’s staging of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking won the award for best new production. The Royal Opera’s presentation of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen received the best new opera award, distinguishing a newly created work from a new staging of an existing score.
Six rising stars were recognised: mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor, countertenor Hugh Cutting, pianist Junyan Chen, violinist Irène Duval, conductor Adam Hickox and composer Lucy Walker.
The early-music award went to The Telling, with support from the Continuo Foundation. The ensemble also contributed to the ceremony’s musical programme, with soprano Héloïse Bernard and harpsichordist Aidan Phillips performing Purcell’s She Loves and She Confesses Too.
Other performances brought the recipients themselves into the celebration. Cutting sang Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus with His Lute with pianist Murray Hipkin, while Taylor and Hamish Brown presented Herbert Howells’s King David.
Duval played the Gavotte from Bach’s Third Partita for solo violin. The closing performance united Taylor, Cutting, Duval and Chen in a special arrangement of Walker’s Make Me an Island, bringing several of the rising-star winners together.
The awards therefore offered more than a succession of presentations. Their performance programme placed established repertoire alongside the work of a newly honoured composer and allowed audiences to hear several of the musicians being recognised. Uchida’s lifetime award supplied the long perspective within a ceremony equally concerned with the next generation.