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Concours de Genève
The Swiss organisation announces the candidates for its 2025/26 conducting competition
As the 2025 Van Cliburn Competition gets under way in Texas, USA, and news comes in of various other music competitions, many people may still be wondering whether competition in general is a good or bad thing in classical music. Music isn't sport. The jury is still out on this matter.
Of perhaps less concern is the inherent ageism of music competitions. Organisers take great pains to remove any religious, race or gender bias from their entry rules, but almost all music competitions have very strict rules about the age of applicants.
Earlier this month we published news about three music competitions, including the seventy-ninth edition of the Concours de Genève in Switzerland, which had recently announced candidates for its viola competition.
Yesterday, the same Concours de Genève announced the candidates for its 2025/26 conducting competition. (This is the first time that the Concours has held a conducting competition since 1994, when Alan Gilbert was the winner.) The competition is unusual in that provides a notably wide range of experiences for its candidates. It runs for more than a year, providing various forms of professional development for its six semi-finalists before the final rounds in late 2026.
One-hundred-and-sixty-eight conductors aged twenty to thirty-three, representing more than thirty nationalities, applied for this competition. Of these, twenty-four candidates (aged 22-32) have now been selected for the first round, including ten from Europe, nine from Asia, one from South Africa and one from Australia.
Bertrand de Billy, President of the Jury, commented:
The jury, working in perfect harmony, reached a balanced result that reflects both the diversity of nationalities and the gender ratio already present in the pool of applicants.
The competition was open to conductors born after 13 November 1991. Applicants had to submit videos of two works presenting contrasting repertoire, one with orchestra or ensemble and another with orchestra, ensemble or two pianos.
The first round, with the Orchestre de la Haute école de musique de Genève, will be held from 31 October to 1 November 2025 in Geneva. Each candidate will have twenty-five minutes with the orchestra to work on and/or run through excerpts from Beethoven's Symphony No 2 and Schubert's Symphony No 5. Candidates will prepare these pieces in full and will be given the excerpts from each piece just before going on stage.
The second round will take place from 2-3 November 2025 with the Orchestre de Chambre Genève. The twelve selected candidates will each have forty-five minutes to run through an excerpt of Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes, and work on excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings and Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.
Then comes a break until 2026, during which six semi-finalists take part in a range of professional development activities - masterclasses, workshops and meetings with orchestras - designed to support their growth and build artistic connections before the competition's final stage.
The semi-finals will take place 7-9 November 2026, with six candidates each conducting three different ensembles in forty-five-minute open rehearsals. They will lead the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève in Romantic symphonies by Bizet, Farrenc and Mendelssohn, Ensemble Contrechamps in modern works by Ligeti, Chin or Saunders, and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Debussy's La Mer and concertos by Schumann.
The finals follow, 10-13 November 2026 at Geneva's Victoria Hall, with three finalists conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
In the first final round, each conductor will give the first performance of a new orchestral work by one of the three finalists from the Composition Competition.
In the second final round, they will present one major symphonic work selected from a list including works by Bartók, Debussy, Mahler, Prokofiev, Strauss and Stravinsky. Both final rounds include closed rehearsals and culminate in two public concerts.
Concours de Genève, founded in 1939, runs a variety of music competitions, most recently voice and composition. Further information: concoursgeneve.ch
Posted 20 May 2025 by Keith Bramich
