Around the Music Festival

Barbara Hannigan, a soprano singer and conductor, has been awarded the Polar Music Prize for 2025. This year’s winners are a total of three people, including Hannigan, the British rock band Queen, and the American pianist and jazz musician Herbie Hancock. The award ceremony will be held in Stockholm on May 27th.

The award was established in 1989 by Stig Anderson, who managed the popular Swedish group ABBA, wrote their lyrics, and ran their music publishing company. The award is run by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the music world.

The prize has been awarded to classical artists and pop musicians every year since 1992. The prize money is 1 million Swedish kronor. In the field of classical music, the prize was awarded to Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen last year.

Hannigan is 53 years old and was born in Waverly, Nova Scotia, Canada. After graduating from the University of Toronto, she continued her studies at the Ravinia Festival in the United States and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands.

She is a leading expert in contemporary works and has performed with many famous orchestras, taking part in the world premieres of nearly 90 new works. Her activities as a conductor began in earnest in the second half of the 2000s.

She won a Grammy Award in the United States in 2018 for her first album, “Crazy Girl Crazy,” in which she conducted the Netherlands-based Ludwig Orchestra and also sang.

She has also been the principal guest conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden since the 2018/2019 season, and it has been decided that she will become the principal conductor and artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from 2026.

PHOTO：Göteborgs Symfoniker