Busoni Competition Takes Its Piano Marathon to Nine Cities

The Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition is sending 120 selected pianists into a network of “piano marathons” across nine cities this November. The Global Piano Festival extends the preliminary stage beyond the competition’s home in Bolzano and puts performers before live audiences rather than assessing them only through submitted recordings.

The schedule begins in Florence on 8 November and continues through Paris, Shanghai, Miami, Tokyo, Dortmund, Vienna and Rome before a Boston event on 30 November. Tokyo and Dortmund have two-day slots. The competition received 598 video applications; artistic director Peter Paul Kainrath says the selected 120 now gain a professional stage and direct contact with concert presenters.

Audiences will have a defined role. Each city’s listeners may vote for a pianist to advance, while recordings of all nine marathons will be assessed by a specialist jury. That panel will select twenty-six pianists for the 2027 competition rounds in Bolzano. Audience choice and jury selection therefore operate alongside each other rather than collapsing into a single popular vote.

Kainrath argues that the format should offer more than a funnel toward a prize. Every participant performs publicly and can gain visibility even without advancing. The competition plans to keep profiles of the pianists prominent online for ten months, giving presenters and listeners a way to discover them after the marathons.

Founded in 1949, the Busoni Competition has long used its name as an international marker of piano talent. The new festival tests whether a geographically distributed selection stage can make the process more useful to artists and more engaging for audiences. Its immediate measure will be the quality of the public concerts; the eventual finalists and winners will be decided only after later rounds.