The Classical:NEXT Innovation Award highlights groundbreaking projects that are shaping the future of classical music worldwide. It celebrates individuals and initiatives that drive progress through bold, yet thoughtful and effective, experimentation in ideas, planning, and action.

Each year, three recipients are honoured at the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award Ceremony. For 2026, the Innovation Award placed a focus on New Technologies, encompassing projects that meaningfully engage with emerging or advanced tools to reshape how classical and art music is created, performed, experienced, made accessible or understood. This included works that embed technology as an integral artistic element (such as AI-driven composition, mixed-reality performance, spatial audio, robotics, or interactive digital instruments), initiatives that develop new technological solutions themselves, or artistic explorations that interrogate the evolving relationship between humans and machines. In all cases, the focus is on innovations that push the field forward by expanding creative possibilities, redefining performance practice, or opening new pathways for participation and access within the contemporary classical ecosystem.

Our partner organization Borealis, the annual festival for experimental music and sound presenting concerts, installations, performances and talks that explore the boundaries of contemporary music was granted an Innovation Award. The award recognized its distinctive engagement with technology as a means of reshaping listening and bodily experience, its uses of technology to connect sound, space and the human body serving as a tool for enhancing presence and sensory awareness, prioritising immersion, corporeality and ecological context over display. Offering a compelling vision of how contemporary music can be experienced, not just heard.

The Award was received by Managing Director, Agnes Hvizdalek:

“The world desperately needs music as a unifying force, space to dream and reinvent and envision the future that we want. Festivals are a celebration of what humans can achieve when we collaborate and look after each other’…’we need the collective experience that can be found, it can be life changing.”