Poland Pavilion is Hosting Everyday Chopin Piano Concert

The Chopin Competition is globally recognised as a hallmark of Poland. It is a musical contest of global reach and great renown that has raised positive associations with Poland, and powerfully promoted Polish culture for nearly a century. The Chopin Competition has fans and aficionados all over the world, and in some countries, notably in Japan and South Korea, it triggers particular Chopin manias.

The event respects the rules of fair play, and is regularly quoted as an exemplary competition based on transparent rules. Live streaming makes it efficiently reach contemporary young audiences. In July 2021, the preliminaries of the 18th Competition were watched 4 million times, while the pianists competing in Warsaw in 2015 were followed by music lovers from all corners of the world.

The promotion and dissemination of the brilliant work of Fryderyk Chopin has been the main idea of the competition from its very first edition in 1927. Care has always been taken to have Chopins works performed in style. At the same time efforts were made to encourage the most outstanding young pianists of each following generation to contribute to the tradition of interpreting Chopin.

To quote Dr Artur Szklener, director of the Competition: "the young artists entering the Fryderyk Chopin International Piano Competition undertake an extremely difficult attempt to interpret, in their unique individual manner, the elusive ideal of Chopins music, which many weathered virtuosos count among the most demanding ever to be composed, at the same time standing up to the legend of the winners of the previous editions of the competition.

The course of the 18th Chopin Competition A record number of candidates applied to the 18th Chopin Competition: there were over 500 pianists from all over the world. Due to the limitations imposed in the wake of the pandemic, the Competition was postponed from 2020 to 2021. The preliminaries were held in July, and the jury qualified 87 pianists, 16 of them Polish, to participate in the Chopin Competition.

The 18th Chopin Competition will open at 8:00 p.m. on 2 October with the Gala Opening Concert featuring five winners of the previous editions accompanied by the Belcea Quratet, the Simply Quartet, Krzysztof Firlus and the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrzej Boreyko. Its repertoire is Schumann, Beethoven, and Bach.

The competition is divided into four stages. The first will start at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday, 3 October. Around half of the participants taking part in a given level will qualify to each following one. The pianists will be assessed by a jury composed of eminent pianists and piano teachers.

The results will traditionally be announced from the stairs in the main lobby of the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall on the night of 20/21 October. The prizes will be presented at the 1st Prizewinners Concert held at the Teatr Wielki Polish National Opera at 7:00 p.m. on 21 October.

Thanks to broadcasts on its YouTube channel, the 18th Chopin Competition can be followed live by aficionados of music from all over the world. Even though the competition audience will be hundreds, if not thousands, kilometres apart, in the coming three weeks they will build a community cemented by the joint experiencing of the emotions of the young pianists contending on the stage of the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall. We are in for nearly 100 hours of video-streamed auditions. During the previous competition, held in 2015, the audience watched the auditions 9,300,000 times. If all those individual views were put end-to-end, it would have taken 141 years to watch them. This year the Chopin Institute prepared an app for mobile devices (iOS and Android) that will allow to watch the whole competition. For the first time in its history, you will be able to see performances by participants online in 4K resolution.

Traditionally, the whole Chopin Competition will be broadcast by TVP Kultura, Polish Radio II, and Radio Chopin. Kurier Chopinowski, or the competitions daily paper The Chopin Competition will be accompanied by Kurier Chopinowski, a bilingual daily paper (published in Polish and English). Modelled on Kurier Szafarski from Chopins young years, it will take down the details of the everyday competition reality, record the musical bliss, bring curios and secrets hoarded in Chopin archives and museum treasuries to the light, and draw fascinating miscellanea from the forgotten and lavish history of the competition.

The Chopin Competition in the world. Initially, the winners of the Chopin Competition were pianists from Europe. Its popularity quickly grew with time, and the representatives of the distant corners of the world, to mention the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Vietnam more and more often graced the number of winners. Many of them became national heroes in their respective countries.

For many years the competition held in Warsaw has enjoyed a great popularity in the countries of the Far East: Japan, China, and after the triumph of Seong Jin-Cho also in South Korea. On the wake of the success of the young piano virtuoso, the sales of classical music CDs skyrocketed by 400% in his home country.

In the past, the successive editions of the Chopin Competition enjoyed a growing interest of the audience and media interest. The First Fryderyk Chopin International Piano Competition was broadcast by the Polish Radio. In turn, the fifth edition in 1955 was the first to be televised, and each day 27 aeroplanes delivered the tapes with competition recordings to foreign broadcasting corporations.

Another milestone was the 16th edition of the competition held in 2010, during which the performances were streamed live on the Internet for the first time. Currently, the news of the Chopin Competition are followed by nearly 1000 journalists from all over the world, and around 100 representatives of the media will arrive in Warsaw from several countries this year.

Around the Chopin Competition A wide array of various events linked to the figure of the composer are held around the 18th Chopin Competition in Warsaw. From September you can visit Chopin. Salon Romantyczny / Chopin. Romantic Salon exhibition in the Royal Castle in Warsaw (closes on 14 November). Temporary exhibitions are also being prepared in the Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw and the Birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin in Żelazowa Wola. Chopin. Potęga znaku / Chopin. The Power of the Sign exhibition opens in Warsaw on 13 October, Siudmak / Chopin / Nokturny exhibition opens in Żelazowa Wola on 1 October, and Harmony Marcin Ryczek exhibition of photographs on 22 October.

The neon designed by Anna Libera and Jan Strumiłło will light up and shine on the Bastion of the Fryderyk Chopin Museum at 7:00 p.m. on 1 October the International Day of Music.

The tradition of organising a solemn observation of Fryderyk Chopin anniversary of death was inaugurated during the 8th Competition in 1970. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Requiem resounds in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, where the composers heart has been deposited, on 17 October: a day that remains free from competition auditions. Following Chopins last will, the piece was performed during the composers funerary ceremony in St Madeleines Church in Paris in 1849. In 2021, on the 172nd anniversary of the death of the patron of the competition, Mozarts Requiem will be performed by Collegium Vocale 1704 and Collegium 1704 conducted by Vclav Luks, with soloists Simona aturov (soprano), Sara Mingardo (alto), Maximilian Schmitt (tenor), and Jan Martink (bass).

The NCK National Centre for Culture Poland launched Domwka z Chopinem: an educational campaign addressed to all cultural centres in Poland to encourage local hubs to run music workshops devoted to the Polish composer, and to organise joint watching of the live streams.

The Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM) has also joined into the promotion of the Chopin Competition around the world by inviting representatives of the foreign media to Warsaw, and financing promotional campaigns in the cities of the world.

Partners and Sponsors:

The main co-funder of the competition is the Ministry of Culture, National Heritage, and Sport. The Patron of the Chopin Institute and the Chopin Competition is PKN Orlen; the Main Partner is Totalizator Sportowy; and the partners are PZU, Emitel, Kopernik SA, and Lexus. Without their involvement, it would have been impossible to organisethe competition on such a spectacular scale.