A cello concerto drawing on concepts of sutures, mended objects, visible scars and ultimately healing, has won the 2026 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition from the University of Louisville. “A Sutured World,” by Australian composer Liza Lim, is a four-movement work that is inspired by Buddhist sutras and the Japanese concept of kintsugi: a process for repairing broken ceramic using gold leaf to highlight, rather than conceal, the cracks.
Lim’s concerto seems to find every possible sound the cello (and orchestra) can make: lyrical, crunchy, percussive and resonant. It’s well-balanced with moments that pull you to the edge of your seat and others that feel like a meditation. It’s also playful: the last movement is a dual take on the children’s game “Simon says” and the German children’s song “Alle Vögel fliegen hoch” that pits the solo cello with taunting percussion.
Lim wrote the work to be performed by Nicolas Alstaedt, a German-French cellist who has championed works by other leading composers, including Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina and previous Grawemeyer-winner Tomas Adès. Alstaedt premiered it in October 2024 with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Lim’s artistic output moves between music, cultural and environmental science spaces: she’s the first musician awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship to use music as a way to “communicate the urgency of climate change and lead social change.” Her opera “Tree of Codes,” based on the Jonathan Safran Foer book of the same name, envisions a world where all of nature collides – where birds speak, humans sing like birds. An early 2000’s work called “The Compass” is for orchestra, flute and didgeridoo, and in 2026 she’ll have a new work for ancient Celtic trumpets.
The Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition was first awarded in 1985, and is one of the largest cash awards in the field. The winners give a lecture at the university in the spring.
Lim spoke with Daniel Gilliam, LPM’s Director of Programming, about her honor.
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Daniel Gilliam: Take me back to the first ideas for this concerto, the ideas of sutures and repairs to rips or cracks.
Liza Lim: The piece is a cello concerto called "A Sutured World." It's for the fabulous soloist, Nicholas Alstaedt, and I spent time with him, just getting to know the kind of sound he makes and the repertoires he's interested in. And as with all of these projects you don't know everything at the beginning about how it's going to turn out, or where the focus is necessarily going to be. And the thing that really challenged me from the very beginning was the sheer beauty of his sound. And I was like, “How does his beauty come into my particular musical world?” And how it was in the end, was a kind of confrontation between this illuminated beauty of sound that Nicholas makes. And then these ideas of something having been fragmented, something having been broken and then put together again, repaired with this kind of golden thread of sound. Yeah, so that was kind of how those ideas evolve for me really from the quality of the sound. And it's often like that for me, sound is something that is really alive and speaks to me and kind of co-composes the work,
DG: Reading your words about the creation of the concerto, I was struck by the number of non-musical concepts and ideas that inspired you. Is this something that normally happens when you're thinking about a new work, is reaching for non musical inspiration?
LL: Yes, that's interesting, isn't it? Because, you don't say, “Yes, it's in sonata form with this, this theme followed by the next theme.” I do reach out particularly to poetry and sort of different images. In this case, the Japanese aesthetics of kintsugi, which is a repair of broken pottery with gold lacquer and what else is in there, the Beatles “Blackbird” is in there. And, yeah, this idea of stitching and suturing and telling stories through stitching, I suppose they are. They are ways of thinking musically. For me, these are musical structures, in a way. They're not kind of separate from what the music is doing. In my mind, anyway, I don't think you need to know the story to understand the music, but it's a kind of music analysis for me, when I think about these things,
DG: Was this a prize you were super familiar with? You know, before receiving it, did you know the legacy of which you were joining?
LL: I have to say, yes, it's a prize I've been familiar with for all of my career. In fact, I distinctly remember particular people winning the prize. For instance, Chinary Ung and Joan Tower, very early on, impressed me, because they sort of stood out as models both in terms of gender and cultural background. And it was like, “Oh, that's possible.” So it always, actually has been a kind of, you know, dream. It's an extraordinary dream to sort of be part of now.
