No winner was announced for this year’s Pierre Fournier Award. Taking place on 10 May at London’s Wigmore Hall, the event saw two cellists – Valentino Worlitzsch (pictured), from Germany, and the UK’s Jonathan Dormand – receive ‘incentive grants’ worth £1,000 each. South Korean Christine Lee and Britain's Laura van der Heijden were also finalists at the event.
Born in 1989 in Hanover, Worlitzsch has previously won the €10,000 first prize at the 2015 Pacem in Terris Competition in Bayreuth, and received a special prize at the Emanuel Feuermann International Cello Competition in January this year. He was also a semi-finalist at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition in St Petersburg. Both Dormand and Lee were semi-finalists at the Windsor International String Competition while van der Heijden is best known for winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2012.
The event was inaugurated in 1988 by Ralph Kirshbaum as a tribute to French cellist Pierre Fournier, who died in 1986. Former winners include Gemma Rosefield, Richard Harwood and Gregor Horsch, and the last winner, in 2013, was Chiara Enderle.
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