The 16-year-old Austrian violinist Leonhard Baumgartner, Discovery Award winner of the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA), has received the Zoltan Kodaly Prize at the International Summer Academy of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The prize is awarded for an outstanding interpretation of works by Kodaly. Baumgartner played Adagio and Kallai Kettös.
The young violinist also won the Carl Flesch Prize of the Carl Flesch Academy in July. He came first of sixteen finalists aged 11-29, who played with the Philharmonie Baden-Baden and conductor Heiko Mathias Förster
According to a review by Laurence Vittes, Baumgarter « had nailed everything technically as his body inscribed all sorts of angles, and was intimately involved in the duets with winds and the solo cello. He and the orchestra built the climax up together through the overflow of Schumann’s lyrical emotion. His cadenza showed superb rhetorical flair and flow, and his phrasings of the last arpeggios were pure poetry.
