Nonino Prize "To an Italian master of our time" 1999

Claudio Abbado

We want to award this acknowledgement to a man who is at the same time an example of extremely high artistic stature and generous and tireless moral and social commitment. Claudio Abbado not only continues from the most prestigious platform of the world to carry on his extraordinary and maieutic work of recreation, interpretation and divulgation of the highest universal music, which he revives with exceptional artistic genius, but he also devotes a great part of his energy and his time, with an unequalled sense of human and civil responsibility, to support and encourage in several ways young talents, giving life to three youth orchestras and promoting an unbelievable series of cultural initiatives of cosmopolitan extension, aiming to give the global meaning of the civilization of our time, to save their values and to face the crises. In such way Claudio Abbado has become not only an example of exceptional artistic creativity, but also of humanity and generosity, of culture meant as service, and therefore a reference point for the world of music and not only.