AAF-2025

Preface August 2024, the 3 rd AAF Conference was held in Cleveland (Ohio, USA). It was overwhelming and heart-warming to see that around 80 competition organisers from all over the world had decided to come to our conference, even though it was for most of them a long trip. I was very happy to see them all. We are very grateful for their participation in the fruitful discussions during the sessions and the breaks. The next conference has been scheduled for 2026 and will be back in Europe. It will be great if those who were unable to attend in Cleveland can then also join us again.

In musical sense, 2025 will be a most exceptional year with many important international piano competitions: the famous Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels, the Cliburn, Beethoven, Honens and many more. All these competitions play an important role. Not only do they offer the young musicians a platform to present themselves, but they also give them substantial support for their future careers. At some of these competitions, the prize money is astonishingly high. Five years ago, when the covid pandemic hit the world and we all had to live with social restrictions for quite a while, most of the music competitions were scaled down. At the same time, online competitions became very popular. Now, it has become almost standard for many competitions to carry out a preselection by video and then to allow only a drastically reduced number of pianists to come to the live rounds of the competition. We can also see more and more that after an initial application fee, another participation fee is requested. At the same time, there is a huge desire by all those aspiring young musicians around the world to have an opportunity to perform and to start a career. As a consequence, the number of applications by pianists to participate in an international competition has been going up enormously. Last year, quite many competitions reported to have received record numbers of applications. It is a huge task for the competition organisers to carefully examine and evaluate hundreds of video recordings. At the same time, one may wonder how they can manage to do so in a fair way, each panel member giving serious and equal attention to every applicant’s recording. It’s truly wonderful when a competition has the means to arrange for live auditions We are all looking forward to a very exciting musical year with beautiful performances and great winners at all these competitions!

Gustav Alink

Alink-Argerich Foundation 2025