Liszt Prize-winning pianist Kálmán Dráfi believes that anyone who can give an excellent performance of Bartók can play almost anything else and that therefore one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century ought to receive a higher stature in the repertoires of Hungarian pianists. A department head at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Dráfi is a member of the jury for the Bartók World Competition, which is expected to decide late Saturday night who wins this year’s piano category.

An English-language international conference linked to this year’s Bartók World Competition has again been held by the Institute for Musicology of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Held on September 14, the symposium focused on Bartók and the piano and the first volume of a Bartók complete critical edition published by the Institute this year.

The jury for this year’s Bartók World Competition is headed by Kenji Watanabe, one of Japan’s best-known pianists, who is also noted for his authentic interpretations of Liszt and Bartók. Currently a lecturer at the Tokyo University of the Arts, he studied at the Liszt Academy in the 1980s, where he learned to speak Hungarian, and he believes that his command of the language has helped him a great deal to uncover the inner logic of Bartók’s musical world.

On Saturday, Ádám Balogh, Peter Klimo and Ádám Szokolay are to compete in the orchestral finals of the Bartók World Competition organized by the Academy of Music. The three pianists will each play a piece of their own choice accompanied by the Hungarian National Philharmonic conducted by Zsolt Hamar.

The Wednesday semi-finals have produced a list of competitors to play in the Bartók World Competition solo finals: three Hungarians, a Hungarian-American, a Ukrainian and a Spanish pianist have cleared the bar.

The jury decided on Tuesday evening that 14 competitors, that is, two more than had originally been planned, would go on to the Bartók World Competition semi-finals. The two-day preliminaries produced a list of semi-finalists, including five Hungarian, one Hungarian-American, one Ukrainian, one Bulgarian, one Spanish, one Czech, one South Korean, one Chinese-American and two Chinese contestants.

An open-air festival held in Liszt Ferenc Square on Sunday ushered in this year’s third World Bartók Competition. The order in which competitors will appear in the preliminaries was decided on the opening day of the series of events organized by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

On 8 September, a free open-air festival will usher in the Bartók World Competition, organized by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music for pianists this time. 

Some musical characteristics of his compositions, especially in his works for piano, are inseparable from his pianist personality. They are also defined by the fact that he always intended his works, even those containing his most abstract ideas, for actual performance.