CONCOURS DE GENÈVE CONDUCTING COMPETITION 2025–2026
Blazing a new trail: the Concours de Geneve returns to conducting for the first time since 1994, with an innovative new format BY CHARLOTTE GARDNER JOURNALIST, CRITIC & WRITER
CONCOURSGENEVE.CH
With its annually rotating instrumental disciplines and long list of starry laureates, the Concours de Genève never mounts an edition that doesn’t feel fresh and special in its own way. That said, the forthcoming Conducting Competition promises to be doubly exciting.
‘I was there myself on the night of the 1994 final, and remember it with absolute clarity’ says current Competition General Secretary, Didier Schnorhk. ‘I was a musician myself at the time, and was very impressed. It was something very different. So when I then took charge of the Competition in 1999, I thought, Since the Concours de Genève’s foundation in 1939, there “I want to do the same”’. have only ever been three Conducting competitions, and the last one in 1994 was won by none other than What with the additional financial and logistical Alan Gilbert, the famously innovative, Grammy Award- pressures inherent in staging a highest-level conductwinning American conductor currently at the helm of ing competition, that ambition ended up having to Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and Royal wait. Now that it’s here though, inspired in part by Swedish Opera. Look online and you can still watch his the Concours de Genève’s approaching 80th anni1994 Prizewinner’s concert performance, leading the versary, Schnorhk is not so much doing ‘the same’, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (OSR) and 1990 Piano as spreading wings the competition’s wings with an Competition winner Nelson Goerner in a supremely innovative and ambitious new format. Most immediassured Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto – met by the ately striking is that it is held over two years – a conVictoria Hall audience with roof-lifting applause. scious emulation of the recently-established Rotterdam
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