The BBVA Foundation pays tribute to the 17th Frontiers of Knowledge Awards laureates with a gala concert in Euskalduna Bilbao

The 17th Frontiers Awards have gone to Avelino Corma, John F. Hartwig and Helmut Schwarz in Basic Sciences; Daniel Joshua Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst and Svetlana Mojsov in Biology and Biomedicine; Anil K. Jain and Michael I. Jordan in Information and Communication Technologies; Camille Parmesan in Climate Change and Environmental Sciences; Olivier Blanchard, Jordi Galí and Michael Woodford in Economics, Finance and Management; Philip Kitcher in Humanities; Icek Ajzen, Dolores Albarracín, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald and Richard E. Petty in Social Sciences; and Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa in Music and Opera.

The Basque National Orchestra, with Fabián Panisello conducting and Akiko Suwanai on solo violin, offered a program whose first part comprised Fuga (2. Ricercata) a 6 voci from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Musical Offering, with Anton Webern’s musical arrangement, and Violin Concerto “Genesis” by this year’s music laureate Toshio Hosokawa. The second part was given over to a landmark work by British composer William Walton, his Symphony No. 1 in B-flat minor.

Maestro Hosokawa’s work arises from a deeply felt connection with nature and the sea, which for him is not just a landscape but a metaphor for the universal, for a music that transcends geography and culture. His Genesis concerto takes us on a musical journey though a human life, starting from the prenatal stage where the chords conjure the wave-like motion of the amniotic fluid and the harp reproduces the beats of the mother’s heart; beats which extend out to embrace all of nature – a second mother – so consumingly important in Japanese art.

A bridge between the Japanese musical tradition and contemporary Western aesthetics

Toshio Hosokawa received the award for “the extraordinary international reach of his work,” which “has built a bridge between the Japanese musical tradition and contemporary Western aesthetics,” in the words of the selection committee. The composer’s “extensive, genre-spanning catalogue,” as the citation describes it, “is inspired by Zen philosophy and characterized by the use of timbral writing of great rigor, and a richness that is at once original and wholly recognizable.”

Despite coming from a family steeped in Japanese culture, the young Hosokawa had little interest in his own traditions, and left the country in 1976 to study in Europe. Among his earliest influences were European composers like the Hungarian György Ligeti or fellow Frontiers of Knowledge laureate Helmut Lachenmann, with whom he coincided in Berlin as artist-in-residence. It was while living in Germany that he was urged by his mentor, the South Korean composer Isang Yun, to go back to his roots in order to find his own musical voice. Hosokawa took his advice and returned to Japan to explore in detail its techniques, instruments and traditions.

The awardee proposes a dichotomy between the Western and Eastern conception of musical time, between what he calls “horizontal time and vertical time.” In European music, he contends, time is constructed horizontally by accumulation. In the Eastern Zen tradition, conversely, time follows the circular pattern of breathing. Hosokawa was also drawn to the ancient Japanese art of calligraphy for its ability to replicate sound and silence. And indeed his work evidences the duality between civilization and nature, as well as the Japanese people’s heightened perception of the nuclear threat.

Toshio Hosokawa

Toshio Hosokawa (Hiroshima, Japan, 1955) is considered one of Japan’s most international composers. After beginning piano and composition studies in Tokyo, he moved to Germany in 1976 where he studied composition at the Universität der Künste in Berlin under the South Korean master Isang Yun. He then continued his studies with Swiss composer Klaus Huber at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg (Germany). His name first garnered international attention in the early 1990s with the chamber work series Landscapes (1993), but it was the success of his oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima (1989/2001) and his orchestral piece Circulating Ocean, premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 2005 Salzburg Festival, which would definitively place his work on the music stands of the world’s top orchestras and concert halls.

A prolific author, his nearly 200 scores include concertos for solo instruments, chamber music and film music, as well as works for traditional Japanese instruments and orchestral pieces like his Meditation. To the Victims of Tsunami, commemorating the lives lost during the 2011 disaster in Japan. From 1989 to 1998, Hosokawa was the organizer and artistic director of the Akiyoshidai International Contemporary Music Seminar and Festival in Yamagushi, which he also co-founded. Still in his home country, since 2001 he has been artistic director of the Takefu International Music Festival. Hosokawa was composer-in-residence with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2007 and in 2001 was elected to the Berlin Academy of Arts. He has also been composer-in-residence for the Venice Biennale (1995, 2001) and the Lucerne International Music Festival (2000), among others.

Basque National Orchestra

Promoted by the Basque Government Department of Culture, the Basque National Orchestra was founded in 1982 and is currently one of the country’s foremost symphonic ensembles. Its origins lay in a project entrusted to the then Music Director of the Department of Culture, Imanol Olaizola, and it has remained strongly rooted in the community of its birth. An orchestra of its time, it stands out for its exacting standards and its determination to showcase symphonic music from every period, while placing special emphasis on the creation and dissemination of Basque music within its borders and beyond.

Since Enrique Jordá took up the baton of the new formation as artistic advisor and guided its first steps, different conductors have played their part in nurturing the quality and reach of the Basque Orchestra. Robert Treviño, Jun Märkl, Andrey Boreyko (as principal guest conductor), Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Gilbert Varga and Cristian Mandeal, Mario Venzago, Hans Graf, Miguel Ángel Gómez Martínez, Matthias Kuntzsch, Maximiano Valdés and Jordá himself, its honorary conductor, have governed the fate of the orchestra in its rising trajectory.

Fabián Panisello

Fabián Panisello was Academic Director and Dean at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía from 1996 to 2019, and continues there today as Professor of Composition. As founder and director of PluralEnsemble, he has premiered numerous works by eminent contemporary composers. Panisello has appeared at festivals like the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Venice Biennale, Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, Présences and Ars Musica. He has also held guest lectureships at higher music institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music in London, Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in Budapest, Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and China Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Panisello studied composition with Francisco Kröpfl in Buenos Aires and Bogusław Schaeffer at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and later trained in conducting with Peter Eötvös. His music has been performed by the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Modern and orchestras including Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, SWR Symphonieorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica RTVE and Tonkünstler Orchester. In recent years, he has focused increasingly on opera, with works like Le Malentendu and Les Rois Mages staged in Vienna, Nice, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv and Madrid, or Die Judith von Shimoda, commissioned by the Bregenzer Festspiele and figuring among the nominees for best world premiere in the 2024 Austrian Music Theatre Prize. He is composer-in-residence at the Grafenegg Festival 2025.

About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.

The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in basic sciences, biomedicine, environmental sciences and climate change, information and communication technologies, social sciences, economics, the humanities and music. Since their launch in 2008, the goal of the awards has been to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, of benefit to all humanity; the best instrument at our command to expand our individual worldviews while collectively engaging with the great challenges of our time. Their eight categories are congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century.

The Foundation is partnered in this family of awards by the country’s foremost public research organization, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which appoints evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding disciplinary domain, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of candidates and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. The Council also designates the chairperson of the eight committees deciding the eight award categories and collaborates in the election of their members, thus helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of innovation and scientific excellence. The CSIC president, finally, has a prominent role in the award presentation ceremony that takes place yearly in Bilbao, the permanent home of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards.