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Chuck Berry, Peter Sellars to receive Polar Music Prizes

The Polar Music Prize, music's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, will go to two Americans this year: rock 'n' roll icon Chuck Berry and theater/opera director Peter Sellars.

Both laureates will be presented with the awards by King Carl XVI of Sweden at a gala Aug. 26 in Stockholm.

The world's most prestigious music prize was founded 25 years ago by Stig "Stikkan" Anderson, ABBA's publisher, lyricist and manager, and is named after his Polar Music record label, which he founded to "break down musical boundaries by bringing together people from all the different worlds of music."

The inaugural prize when to Paul McCartney. Since then, recipients have included Joni Mitchell, Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Simon, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Renee Fleming, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones and Burt Bacharach.
Each Polar Music Prize recipient receives a trophy and $150,000. The Stig Andersen Music Award Foundation detailed the citations in a release:

Chuck Berry Citation:

The Polar Music Prize 2014 is awarded to Chuck Berry from St. Louis, USA. The parameters of rock music were set one day in May 1955, when Chuck Berry recorded his debut single Maybellene. Chuck Berry was the rock'n'roll pioneer who turned the electric guitar into the main instrument of rock music. Every riff and solo played by rock guitarists over the last 60 years contains DNA that can be traced right back to Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and a million other groups began to learn their craft by playing Chuck Berry songs. Chuck Berry is also a superb songwriter. In the course of three minutes he conjures up an image of the everyday life and dreams of a teenager, often with the focus on cars. Chuck Berry, born in 1926, was the first to drive up onto the highway and announce that we are born to run.

Peter Sellars Citation:

The Polar Music Prize 2014 is awarded to Peter Sellars from Pittsburgh, USA. The director Peter Sellars is a living definition of what the Polar Music Prize is all about: highlighting the music and presenting it in a new context. With his controversial productions of opera and theatre, Peter Sellars has depicted everything from war and famine to religion and globalisation. Sellars has set Mozart in the luxury of Trump Tower and in the drug trade of Spanish Harlem, turned Nixon's visit to China into opera and set Kafka's obsession with home cleanliness to music. Peter Sellars shows us that classical music is not about dusty sheet music and metronomic precision, but that classical music, with its violent power and complexity, has fundamentally always been and will continue to be a way of reflecting and depicting the world.



Peter Sellars, renowned theater and opera visionary, has directed more than 100 productions in the United States and Europe.(Photo11: Polar Music Award)