Four works have been shortlisted by the preliminary jury to the 2018 Finals of “Key to the Future” – Opera Composition Competition. The audience can get acquainted with characteristic excerpts from these operas in the Solti Hall at Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music on December 14th, where the finals will take place.
Contestants for the Opera Composition Competition by Bartók Plus in 2018 hugely outnumbered their earlier counterparts. The preliminary jury had to handle 6440 pages of score and approximately 30 hours of music to decide which of the 19 applications should be shortlisted for the Finals.
Members of the professional jury, Marco Taralli and Gyula Fekete, composers and Gergely Kesselyák, artistic director of Bartók Plus Opera Festival came to the unanimous decision that the following candidates qualify for the Finals:
Nora (Albin Fries)
Boszorkányvér (Péter Andorka)
Jane Eyre (Juraj Filas)
Stone Angel (Valentin Dubovskoy)
Gergely Kesselyák said after the decision-making session: The quality of works submitted for this year’s competition well exceeded their predecessors. More important, though, is the fact that the large majority of the candidates have understood our festivals efforts for the popular opera. It is another question that not all of them could come up with an operational recipe for the task. We have come across beautiful compositions that will never become popular operas. There are also works composed of popular operatic elements that are not dramatic enough. In spite of all this there are a few compositions that obviously emerge from this crowd: composed in the spirit of the Artistic Manifesto by Bartók Plus, of unquestionable professional quality and having that certain “plus”, talent that makes the whole of these operas work.
The most characteristic details of the pieces shortlisted for the Finals will be presented to the audience at the Finals held in the Solti Hall at Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music on December 14th.
Tickets for the Finals can be purchased from October 15th via the web site of Bartók Plus Opera Festival, or on the spot, before the performance.
Key to the Future
“Key to the Future” Opera Composition Competition has been advertised by Bartók Plus Opera Festival to draw attention to the need for new "popular operas" conceived in the spirit of the Artistic Manifesto of the festival, that are capable of luring back large audiences to the opera houses.
For the competition addressing contemporary composers 5 Hungarian, 1 Austrian, 1 British, 1 Spanish, 1 American/French, 1 Israeli, 1 Czech (2 submissions), 1 Guatemalan, 1 Czech/Slovak, 1 Brazilian, 2 Polish, 1 Italian and 1 Russian composer have submitted their work in 2018.
