2024 Award Winner: Anika Kildegaard, Soprano

Soprano Anika Kildegaard is regularly sought out as a passionate interpreter and collaborator. She is at home in historical repertoire; she is also a champion of new music, having premiered and commissioned new works from composers including Libby Larsen, Ruby Fulton, and Nicholas Bentz, among others. She has sung with such notable groups as The VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, the Minnesota Chorale, the SPCO Chorale, MPLS (imPulse), and is a core member of the Grammy Award-winning ensemble The Crossing. Recent solo appearances include Mozart’s Missa Brevis in F with Delaware Choral Arts and Osnat Netzer’s I won’t be outrun by a cavalry of snails, with the University of Iowa’s Center for New Music. An album of new works, written for her by French composer Jean-François Charles, was released in late fall 2023.

Her soprano/double bass duo LIGAMENT is dedicated to commissioning new music and creating work for their unique instrumentation. Together with bassist Will Yager, Anika has premiered dozens of new pieces on concert series across the USA, most recently as the ensemble in residence for Washington DC’s District New Music Coalition.

Anika also composes new works for the voice. Her work reflects her dissection of language as it relates to music, and is driven by the conviction that text is essential. Everything in a narrative signifies; it carries meaning, double-meaning, character, lessons, morals, immorals, jokes, and all the rest. Her compositional style (as in How to be Glamorous and Dontal) is built on a study of how language, when oversaturated, can become a shadow of itself.

Anika completed a BA from the University of Minnesota Morris in 2013, and an MA from the University of Iowa in 2020.