Thirty-one pianists will start Bartók World Competition

This year’s  Bartók World Competition, launched by the Liszt Academy in 2017 and member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC), was announced for pianists under the age of 32 and application was open until 26 May. Based on the videos submitted, a jury of renowned teachers from the Liszt Academy, Budapest—Katalin Falvai, Attila Némethy and Balázs Réti—selected the 31 candidates who will go through to the live rounds (see the list below).

Among them are six Hungarians, several Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, as well as American, Italian, Spanish, German and Russian citizens.

The events are open to the public: the preliminaries and the semi-finals are free to attend, whereas tickets can be purchased for the solo finals as well as the grand final with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by János Kovács. All these takes place at the Liszt Academy in the first week of September, and will be broadcast online, too.

The competition, supported by the Hungarian government, will award a first prize of €22,000, a second prize of €14,000 and a third prize of €8,000, as well as several special prizes: €4,000 for the best Bartók interpretation, €2,000 for the best performer of contemporary compositions and €1,500 for the audience prize winner. In addition, a number of special awards will be offered to selected participants.

The prestigious international jury is chaired by Yoheved Kaplinsky, Head of the Piano Department and Artistic Director of the Preparatory Piano Department at The Juilliard School in New York. The foreign members of the jury are prominent pianists, who are regular guests of prestigious orchestras and concert halls: the Turkish-American Özgür Aydin, the Ukrainian-German Pavel Gililov, who is the founding artistic director of the Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn, and the Chinese Zhe Tang, Professor and Deputy Dean of the Shanghai Conservatory. The jury will also include internationally renowned Hungarian personalities. Dr. Gábor Farkas, Liszt Prize-winning pianist, President of the Liszt Academy and Head of the keyboard department, Gyula Fekete, Erkel Prize-winning composer, Vice-President of the Liszt Academy, and Dezső Ránki, Artist of the Nation.

This year's competition attracted 55 young talents from 19 countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, the United States, Canada and several European countries, the youngest being 15 years old. “It's a good number considering the difficulty of the repertoire, as the contestants need to know more than just frequently performed works,” said András Csonka, project manager of the Bartók World Competition and programme director of the Liszt Academy.

He added that the Musicology Department of the Music Academy of Hungary will organise its second international conference on Central European Music History.

The compulsory repertoire will focus on Bartók's most important works for piano, which will be included in all rounds, but the competitors will also have to demonstrate their skills by playing works by Liszt, Kodály, Dohnányi, Scarlatti, Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. A special feature of the Bartók Competition is the inclusion of the prize-winning works of the composition competition in the compulsory repertoire of the instrumentalists, including two pieces from the 2024 round of the composition competition: the Vertigineux (Vertigineux) by Lee Hanuri and the Kirakós (The Dizzy) by Mátyás Papp.

In the final, the contestants will have the choice between Bartók's Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3, Beethoven's Piano Concertos Nos. 3 and 5, Liszt's Dance of Death and Piano Concerto in E-flat Major.

Further information: bartokworldcompetition.hu

List of applicants selected for preliminaries:

Conte, Davide

Forgó, Benjámin

Fukuhara, Mitsuki

Hasegawa, Eriko

Jiang, Michael

Kim, Jeonghwan

Kim, Hyunji

Kitahara, Yoshitsugu

Kliuchereva, Anastasiia

Kovács, Gergely

Lee, Jaeyoon

Leung, Edward

Lin, Yongjie

Miyazato, Motoshi

Nakagawa, Yuna

Oh, Yugyeong

Onobe, Nanako

Onodera, Takuma

Orsovai, Endre

Pellet, Sebestyén

Plada, Gorka

Rozsonits, Ildikó

Stier, Alexa Dorottya

Urano, Myuka

Vrána, Tomáš

Wang, Zhu

Wang, Yuetong

Xie, Lingfei

Ye, Zifan

Yoon, WooJung

Zhang, Minyi