Honey cakes for good luck

Musicians from Australia, China, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine will show their mastery in the Horowitz Debut group (65 participants) and the Junior group (19 participants).

“Traditionally, the competition will begin with a draw at the Kyiv Reinhold Gliere Institute of Music,” Iryna POLSTIANKINA, president of the International Charitable Foundation of the Vladimir Horowitz Competition, told The Day. “This year we decided to sweeten the ceremony a little, and the future contesters will be drawing… honey cakes, not pieces of paper, with the serial number of their performance marked on the reverse side.”

The young pianists will be auditioned on April 19-22 at the Grand Hall of the Kyiv House of Scientists. The jury will be chaired by Valerii Kozlov, a professor at the Piano Department of the National Music Academy of Ukraine. The Horowitz Debut and the first round of the Junior Group’s participants will be auditioned from Thursday to Sunday from 9:30 a.m. and from 4 p.m., respectively. The second round will take place on April 23.

In the third round (April 24-25), finalists of the Junior Group will be accompanied by the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine conducted by Vitalii Protasov in the acoustically-best Mykola Lysenko Hall of Columns. The finale of this competition will be the award ceremony and the concert of winners on April 25 at the Philharmonic. Incidentally, the Ukrainian piano school will be represented as broadly as possible, with participants coming from almost all the regions.

In addition to cash prizes (in the Junior Group: first prize – 2,000 dollars and a gold medal; second prize – 1,500 dollars and a silver medal; third prize – 1,000 dollars and a bronze medal; fourth prize – 600 dollars and a title of laureate; fifth prize – 300 dollars and a title of laureate; and sixth prize – 200 dollars and a title of laureate), winner will receive special prizes from VIP guests, sponsors, and partners of the competition, including concerts in prestigious European halls and at festivals, orchestra-accompanied performances, a scholarship for the Kyiv-based International Summer Music Academy in 2018, and performances at a Radio Aristocrats concert.

It will be recalled that the International Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz is the only Ukrainian contest represented in the European Union of Music Competitions for Youth (EMCY) and the World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC). In various years, its winners were the now well-known Ukrainian musicians Vadym Kholodenko, Oleksandr Hryniuk, Anatolii Baryshevskyi, Roman Lopatynskyi, Dmytro Choni, and others, who adequately represent Ukrainian piano art in the world. This year’s competition is sure to produce new starlets of the piano.

Incidentally, all the events can be watched online – on the competition’s website horowitz.org, in Facebook and YouTube.