Glocal Piano Project 2022

After three logistically challenging weeks, the Glocal Piano Project 2022 in cooperation with Steinway & Sons, which replaced the former pre-selections of the Busoni Piano Competition, has been concluded successfully.
Over a period of 10 days (November 6 to 16), the Bolzano-based Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition held a hybrid form of its first round of the competition in 12 cities on three continents: Seoul, Hamburg, London, Paris, Munich, New York City, Vienna, Beijing, Hong Kong, Brescia, Changsha and Istanbul. The 20-minute contributions by the 100 pianists admitted to participate were professionally recorded following identical technical specifications and published online on both the Busoni website and that of Steinway & Sons.

This video pool served as the basis for the evaluation for 7 jurors who were set the task to select 26 participants for the finals, held in August 2023. At the same time, 35.000 users made use of the opportunity to watch the performances online to get a picture of the artistic diversity and quality of young up-and-coming pianists. Up to four additional candidates could be selected through the audience’s vote. Due to overlap with the jury’s verdict, 3 finalists ended up being chosen by 10.657 registered users. The videos remained available at www.busoni-mahler.eu until the start of the final round in 2023.
Unlike 2021, when the Glocal Piano Project was conceived as a response to lock downs and travel restrictions, the 2022 live audiences were able to attend the performances at almost all venues – the Steinway & Sons branches in turn became “embassies” of the Busoni competition all around the world, from New York to London, from Paris to Seoul. The international visibility of the profiled competition was able to benefit greatly.
Another notable feature was the fact that the organizing Busoni-Mahler Foundation dispensed with all national symbols like indications of citizenship, flags etc. This measure reflects the conviction that musicians are individual personalities, representing their interpretive position, not their nationality. The vision of the competition is thus in harmony with the intellectual legacy of the namesake himself, because Ferruccio Busoni was not only an outstanding artistic personality of modernism, but also saw himself as a Weltbürger who maintained his own network of protagonists and supporters of the avant-garde.