Elena Urioste wins BBC award

Elena Urioste has won the BBC Music Magazine Premiere Award with pianist Tom Poster for their Jukebox Album, which includes six premieres they commissioned as part of their #UriPosteJukebox lockdown project, with composers such as Mark Simpson, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Huw Watkins.

Urioste says of the win: 'When we started the the original Jukebox project we couldn't possibly have imagined the directions it would go in. It was a total whim, heavily influenced by jet lag. We thought we were just doing like a cute and vaguely humorous thing for our friends and family while we all waited out the first lockdown. But 88 days later and then six premieres later Orchid Classics approached us and asked if there was anything we wanted to record. I thought it would be great to get those six premieres down, because they're such special pieces, and I thought it would be amazing to memorialise them. The idea of doing a studio version of the Jukebox formed around that. It felt like an ode to the time we all spent together, alone but together, in this period of total uncertainty, but also the weird form of connectedness around the world as we were all going through something quite similar. It wound up being a special album and to have that recognised is surreal, but lovely.'