From July 7 to 15, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra’s conducting competition The Mahler Competition will take place for the seventh time.Nineteen young conductors will compete in Bamberg. The repertoire this year includes Gustav Mahler’s 7th Symphony, from which different movements will be played in each round.
In the first round (July 7-9), all 19 candidates will additionally conduct excerpts from Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G major.
The best 9 will advance to the second round (July 9-10) and will have the opportunity to perform Bernd Richard Deutsch’s newly commissioned work (Con moto) and additional movements from Mahler’s 7th Symphony. In the semifinals on July 12, the candidates will have to convince the jury with Alban Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder and further movements from Mahler’s 7th Symphony. On July 13, the final will take place, with Igor Stravinsky’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D and Gustav Mahler’s 7th Symphony.
All rounds will be streamed live, the link to the stream can be found on the competition page: https://www.themahlercompetition.com .
The selected candidates come from the USA, Korea, Georgia, Israel, Ukraine and Peru, but also from Europe – including Norway, Italy, Poland and Germany. The youngest candidate is 21, the oldest 35 years old.
The international jury is once again made up of a wide variety of people from the classical music world: In addition to patron Marina Mahler, who supports the jury as an honorary member, as well as jury president Jakub Hrusa, the principal conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, conductors such as Barbara Hannigan and John Storgards, music managers such as Deborah Borda and Pamela Rosenberg, as well as composers and artists such as Thomas Hampson are included.
