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A bold New Vision- the 2025 Geneva Competition

Competitions

As the candidates for the competition's 2025 live rounds are announced, Secretary General Didier Schnorhk outlines a number of ambitious and innovative ideas

Artistic Innovation, Audaciousness and ambition, Support for the laureates, and “Listening to the needs of the city” are the key elements of the Geneva Competition’s vision for its 2025 edition, held in the disciplines of Viola and Conducting.
„The viola has long been underestimated“,  says Didier Schnorhk, Secretary General of the Geneva Competition, but it has somewhat become “the new violin”- despite the fact that there were only four viola editions in the history of the Concours de Genève, a number of great artists have emerged from these years: Nobuko Imai in 1968, Tabea Zimmermann in 1982, and Rystard Groblewski, Jennifer Sturm and Maxim Rysanov in 2005. 

Zimmermann, chairwoman of the jury this year, remembers the 1982 competition: "It was shortly before my 16th birthday, in October 1982. Having spent ten years at the municipal music school in Lahr, where I received the very best basic training you could possibly get, I went to study with Ulrich Koch as a junior student in Freiburg. One time, he went on sabbatical for a few months and appointed a former student as a substitute. When he came back, he simply announced in my lesson: „Good afternoon, you know you're going to Geneva?“
„I'm going to Geneva?” I thought. 
He just sent me there, but I had taken part in the “Jugend Musiziert” national competition a few months earlier, and I had already studied most of the repertoire required for the Geneva competition. At the summer academy in 1982 at the Mozarteum Salzburg, I had played the Stamitz Concerto for the first time with orchestra. There was a young conductor who was selected by the conducting course at the time, and his name was Paavo Järvi. He was twenty at the time, we practiced the Stamitz together, and I went to Geneva with that experience, so to speak.
 

Tabea Zimmermann in 2023

I went from round to round and I went home with this first prize. Incidentally, the teaching assistant of Ulrich Koch who had prepared me was also in the final. She won second or third prize. But in the end, a lot of things came out of it for me. I immediately received an invitation from Gidon Kremer to his festival in Lockenhaus. Maybe that was the most important consequence of this competition for me, because Lockenhaus Festival opened many doors for me. So I was the duckling in the pond, in a completely different age group than everyone else there, but they took me seriously and went on tour with me in the following years. I traveled the world, I was in Australia, Taiwan, Korea, New York, Chicago, Copenhagen… Those were all great first opportunities to perform with sometimes crazy but interesting colleagues, and I benefited a lot from that. I got to know an incredible amount of music and met lots of new people…"

Concours de Genève
Viola 2025 
Live Rounds 6- 12 November 2025 at Salle Franz Liszt and Victoria Hall
Jury: Tabea Zimmermann (Chair), Tomoko Akasaka, Ettore Causa, Cynthia Phelps, Pauline Sachse, Jean Sulem and German Tcakulov

The 2025 Geneva Competition in Viola will offer official prizes of up to CHF 20.000 (First Prize) as well as a host of special prizes, as well as countless concerts, international tours, career support workshops, two years of professional artist management by Sartory Artists, and more. Repertoire of the competition includes a chamber round with artists such as Corina Belcea, Lena Neudauer, Lionel Cottet and Christian Poltéra for Mozart’s incredibly demanding Divertimento KV 563; and an orchestral round with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Cornelius Meister that includes not only the standard Bartok Viola Concerto, but also compositions by Hindemith, Beamish, and Penderecki. The competition will also include once again its signature feature, the “Artistic Project”, in which the 8 semi-finalists present and explain an original idea of a future project in front of jury and audience.
The viola section 2025 saw 92 applications from 23 nations, among them 46 male and 45 female candidates. This balance stayed the same in the selection of 8 semi-finalists with 4 male and 4 female candidates.

This year will also see the first part of the Concours de Genève’s Conducting Competition, for the first time since Alan Gilbert won First Prize in 1994. With many innovative ideas, this two-year project is an ambitious collaboration with Geneva’s Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève, Ensemble Contrechamps, and the Orchestra of the Haute École de Musique (HEM). It is also intertwined with next year’s composition competition and will feature an exceptional jury throughout its rounds.

For the competition, 24 participants have been selected from among 168 applications. The preselection brought down this number to 24 participants from 18 countries, among them 8 women and 16 men.

Renown conductor Bertrand de Billy, Chair of the Jury, said: “First I have to apologize, as I have never won a conducting competition myself…  but I cannot emphasize more the need for this kind of contest, this kind of opportunity. Not unlike politicians, young conductors have few chances to “practice” with their instrument, the orchestra. They practice with pianists, with school ensembles… but only when they stand in front of a professional symphony orchestra, they can learn what it means having to keep an ensemble of 80 musicians together. And more importantly, while technique is one thing, it is communication that really counts! You need to be authentic and convincing to be able to convey your very own message to an orchestra, and it takes a lot of personality and charisma to get an orchestra like the OSR to change the way it plays…
Recent trends see younger and younger conductors even at major symphony orchestras around the world. Accordingly, our candidates are as young as 22.  Personally, I think that a great conductor, like a great Bourgogne wine, needs time to develop… but I leave it up to you to make your own judgement on the potential of the wonderful young musicians we will experience in this and next year’s competition."

Bertrand de Billy and Didier Schnorhk at a Press Conference of the Geneva Competition on 16 September 2025.

Concours de Genève/ Conducting 2025-2026
Live Rounds 
31 October-3 November 2025, Auditorium Ansermet
7 November- 13 November 2026, Concorde Espace Culture and Victoria Hall
Jury: Bertrand de Billy (Chair), Mark Stringer, Sonia Ben-Santamaria, Baldur Brönnimann, Martin Campbell-White, Unsuk Chin, Marzena Diakun, Rémi Durupt, Laurent Gay, Claire Levacher, Sarah Nemtanu, Eva Ollikainen, Peter Oundjian, Natalia Ponomarchuk, Frauke Roth, Arturo Tamayo, Wingsie Yip
 

 

©WFIMC 2025/FR
Images: ©WFIMC, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Concours de Genève