Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has won the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement.
She will be presented with the award on 17 September at the 65th International Festival of Contemporary Music at Venice's historic Teatro La Fenice.
The opening day of the festival will be dedicated to honouring Saariaho, a ground-breaking electro-acoustic composer who has lived in France for nearly four decades.
The prize committee noted that Saariaho is one of the world's most widely performed contemporary composers. In a statement on Friday, it said that her music "has the gift of power and immediacy and generates original acoustic tapestries and unprecedented sonic narrations”.
The jury said that Saariaho is being honoured in particular for her 1999 work Oltra Mar, calling it "an absolute masterpiece…a harmonically complex but transparent composition, and a synthesis of unusual metamorphic orchestral colours influenced by Impressionism”.
Oltra Mar will receive its Italian premiere on the opening day of the festival, when it will be performed by the Teatro la Fenice choir and orchestra conducted by Spanish conductor Ernest Martinez-Isquierdo.
The committee praised Saariahofor "the remarkable technical and expressive level she has achieved in her choral scores and for her original use of the voice”.
Rated "greatest contemporary composer" in 2019
Since 1982, Saariaho has lived in Paris, where she has been closely associated with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM).
Saariaho has previously won numerous other music awards, including a Grammy Award in 2011 for her opera L'amour de loin, the Polar Music Prize in 2013 and the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2000. Saariaho was ranked as the greatest contemporary composer in a 2019 poll by BBC Music Magazine.
Interviewed by Yle in December, Saariaho was sharply critical of Finnish officials' decisions to cancel concerts and festivals to slow the spread of coronavirus while allowing restaurants, bars and other sectors to keep operating.