Auditions for the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award were held on 11 December 2009. The jury, headed by the artistic and executive director of LUCERNE FESTIVAL, Michael Haefliger, awarded the prize unanimously to the cellist Nicolas Altstaedt. The award is accompanied by a cash endowment of 75,000 Swiss francs, and the winner will give a solo performance at LUCERNE FESTIVAL on 17 September 2010 together with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

Nicolas Altstaedt was born into a Franco-German family in 1982. He was one of the last pupils of Boris Pergamenchikov in Berlin, where he then continued his studies with Eberhard Feltz. Recent highlights include appearances with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner, the Stuttgart RSO under Sir Roger Norrington, the Haydn Austro-Hungarian Orchestra under Adam Fischer, the Zurich and Stuttgart chamber orchestras under Dennis Russel Davies, the Winterthur Collegium Musicum under Mario Venzago, the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, the Kremerata Baltica, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, and the New Zealand, Melbourne, Berlin and Helsinki RSOs. He is one of the few European artists to be accepted into the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society of New York. Nicolas Altstaedt has already won a number of international prizes, including the Landgrave of Hesse Prize from the Kronberg Academy (2004), the first prize at the German Music Competition and the Domnick International Cello Competition in Stuttgart (2005), first prize at the Adam International Cello Competition in New Zealand  (2006), and the Borletti Buitoni Fellowship (2009). He makes regular guest appearances at the festivals in Lockenhaus, Jerusalem, Bad Kissinger, the Ruhr Piano Festival, Schleswig-Holstein, Rheingau, Les Museiques (Basle), and the Ludwigsburg Palace Festival. In summer 2008 he gave his successful début at the Salzburg Festival. Nicolas Altstaedt plays a cello built by Nicolas Lupot (Paris, 1821) on loan from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben.