Liszt Academy announces Bartók World Competition 2025
With a total prize fund of more than 51,000 euros (20 million forints), the competition for pianists will open on 3 March, and the repertoire will naturally focus on Bartók's piano works.
Launched by the Liszt Academy, Budapest in 2017, the 2025 round of the Bartók World Competition, a member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC), is once again held with Hungarian government support. On the bartokworldcompetition.hu portal applications will be open from 3 March to 26 May for talented pianists under 32 years of age. A jury of eminent teachers of the Liszt Academy will select up to 35 candidates for the live rounds based on the videos submitted. The preliminaries, semi-finals, solo and orchestral finals at the Liszt Academy in Budapest from 31 August to 7 September 2025 will of course be open to the public and will be broadcast online.
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 World Competition is the inclusion of the prize-winning works of the composers’ competition in the compulsory repertoire. This time two pieces from the 2024 round of the composition competition have been picked: Vertigineux by Lee Hanuri and Kirakós (Puzzle) by Mátyás Papp.
In the finals, the contestants have to choose between Bartók's Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3, Beethoven's Piano Concertos Nos. 3 and 5, Liszt's Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) and Piano Concerto in E-flat Major, which will be performed with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by János Kovács.
The first prize is €22 000, the second €14 000, the third €8 000, and there will also be 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 institutions will offer invitations tot he best competitors for on-stage performances.
The prestigious international jury will consist of 9 members, 5 foreign and 4 Hungarian artists and professionals. The selection of the members is under way and the list will be published shortly by the organising institution, the Liszt Academy. In previous Bartók World Competitions, the jury has included artists such as Kenji Watanabe, Tamás Vásáry and Andrei Korobejnikov for the 2019 Piano Competition, and the world-renowned British composer Thomas Adès for last year's Composers’ Competition.
