PLEASE NOTE: VOTING FOR THE GRAMOPHONE AWARDS IS NOW CLOSED

Stéphane Denève has been nominated for Gramophone magazine’s prestigious Artist of the Year 2012 award, part of their 2012 Classical Music Awards. The winner is voted for by Gramophone readers, from a shortlist of 10 artists who the magazine’s editorial team ‘really feel have contributed something special to classical music throughout the past year’.

Stéphane is honoured to be included in a distinguished group of nominees, the other artists shortlisted being: soprano Natalie Dessay, tenor Jospeh Calleja, pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, violinist Isabelle Faust, countertenor Phillipe Jaroussky, mezzo Magdalena Kožená, fortepianist Andreas Staier and conductors Daniel Barenboim and Andris Nelsons.

Gramophone have created a special page about Denève, where readers can enjoy the RSNO’s recent ‘Au Revoir, Stéphane’ video and listen to excerpts from Roussel’s Suite in F and the recent Chandos Debussy CD box set.

It is this recording that is singled out in particular by the Gramophone team (alongside the ‘great rapport with [the RSNO] and the Scottish audience’ and ‘an impressive Roussel series for Naxos’). The magazine’s deputy editor, Sarah Kirkup will describe the Debussy recording sessions in the August 2012 issue of Gramophone. During the sessions she interviewed Stéphane and reported:

As Denève himself says, he’s at his most inspired when he’s in front of an audience – “I like the adrenalin,” he admits – so it’s important for him that any recording session feels as charged, as “live”, as possible. And this one did, he says – except, of course, that engineer Couzens, his assistant Jonathan Cooper and producer Brian Pidgeon were in the control room, ready to intervene where necessary…