Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano will chair the jury of this year's Bartók World Competition

Corigliano, a five-time Grammy-winning artist, won an Oscar in 1999 for his film score written for Francois Girard's movie The Red Violin. He composed a violin concerto a few years later based on the film score. His works number more than a hundred, including three symphonies, eight concertos and an opera entitled The Ghosts of Versailles, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Concerning the latter, the starting point for the composer and screenwriter was Beaumarchais’ play entitled The Guilty Mother, which is the third piece in the Figaro trilogy.  Corigliano composed scores of choral, chamber music, songs and symphonic works, and he is a professor at the Juilliard School and at Lehman College, which is part of the City University of New York.

Composers under the age of 40 can apply for this year's composing round of the Bartók World Competition, which takes place in six-year cycles and awards prizes totalling 10,000 euros. The application deadline is August 23, 2022 and the detailed competition announcement is available on the opening page of the bartokworldcompetition.hu portal.

One of the submitted works will be selected as a mandatory piece for the next instrumental round of the Bartók World Competition, the competition for violinists in 2023. The winning compositions will be performed for the first time on November 26, 2022, at the awards gala concert held in the Solti Hall of the Liszt Academy.

Gyula Fekete, head of department and vice-rector at the Liszt Academy and the artistic director of the composing rounds, as well as renowned professors of the institution will be the members of the pre-selection jury. The works selected by this panel to advance to the next rounds will be assessed by a prestigious international jury, which will once again include Unsuk Chin, renowned South Korean composer living in Germany; Israeli-American composer Chaya Czernowin, professor at Harvard University; and Gyula Fekete. This year, Russian composer and pianist Kuzma Bodrov, professor at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and world-famous Hungarian violinist Kristóf Baráti will also be members of the panel.

A special feature of the World Competition is that it focuses on the most specific characteristics of Bartók's oeuvre: violin, piano, chamber music as well as composition in the course of consecutive years. The competition series was launched in 2017, the year marking Béla Bartók's 135th birth anniversary, with a contest for violinists. In the even-numbered years between instrumental competitions, the Liszt Academy organizes a competition for composers and the jury selects from among the works awarded here the piece that will be included in the repertoire of the next instrumental competition.