Busoni piano competition to stage live finals in 2021

Faced with the impossibility of inviting candidates to Bolzano in the year of Covid, the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition has been held virtually its preliminary rounds. While many other international music competitions were cancelled in the pandemic, the Busoni-Mahler Foundation and Steinway & Sons devised an extensive online and digital initiative to allow the competition to go ahead.

The launch in 2020 of the Glocal Piano Project, an online platform for the preliminary rounds, has proved a huge success in ensuring that the final rounds of the 63rd Busoni Piano Competition can take place live later this year if pandemic restrictions are eased as planned.

The response to the Glocal Piano Project has been unprecedented:  506 registrations; 93 participants; 33 finalists; 23 film crews; 23 Steinway & Sons showrooms in 19 countries on four continents; 506,000 views of performance videos on the competition’s own website; 4,500 additional views at Steinway & Sons; and 60,000 views at amadeus.tv in China in just two weeks. In all, there were 19,663 votes cast in the audience vote.

The competition plans to return as a live event in Bolzano, in the Italian Alps, on 24 August, with a concert by 14-year-old child prodigy Alexandra Dovgan. Over the course of 10 days, 33 finalists will perform on two solo stages, a chamber music stage with the  Schumann Quartet, and in the grand final with orchestra on 3 September 2021. 

The competition’s artistic director, Peter Paul Kainrath, said that a live event would be ‘the only way to identify the kind of universal artist to whom the Busoni competition has been owing its particular aura in its long, almost 75-year history.’

The full programme is now available online at: https://www.busoni-mahler.eu/en/events/

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