WDR Liminal Music Prize awarded to George Lewis and Trickster Orchestra

© WDR/Claus Langer/Lena Ganssmann

George Lewis and the Berlin-based Trickster Orchestra has been awarded the 2025 WDR Liminal Music Prize for musical transgressions. The prize will be presented during a concert at Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik on Saturday 3 May, and will be shared equally between the orchestra and composer. Lewis's work Nomads for sheng and ensemble with Wu Wei as soloist will premiere in concert, conducted by Cymin Samawatie.

Lewis says of the new work: "Nomads is a flexible-instrumentation, situational-form work that may be realized by any combination of instruments covering the appropriate pitch ranges. As the performers navigate through the work, the overall effect should be that of several different kinds of musical behaviours heard in juxtaposition, but with a certain common direction."

Awarded for the first time in 2024, the WDR Liminal Music Prize honours artists who innovatively combine different musical traditions or practices, thereby paving the way for a musical future. Founded in 2013 by Cymin Samawatie, Ketan Bhatti, and Philip Geisler, the Trickster Orchestra combines instruments from a wide variety of musical traditions in a new form of collectively created contemporary music.

Matthias Kremin, WDR 3 Program Director: "By honouring composer George Lewis and the Trickster Orchestra, the WDR Liminal Music Prize aims to underscore the essential nature of the process of mutual rapprochement in the creation of innovative concepts. The relationship between oral and written communication, between spontaneity and fixed preconceptions, is just as much at stake as the question of individual and collective identity. Everyone must transcend their boundaries to reach a new, third place."