Competitors chosen for Berlin’s Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann

The Kronberg Academy and the Domenico-Gabrielli Foundation of Berlin University of the Arts will be hosting the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann in Berlin for the first time in eight years. The competition's three rounds, held from 15 to 22 November, will see 12 cellists compete for the Grand Prix.

The selected cellists will be competing for the competition’s Grand Prix of €15,000, which also comes with a €10,000 budget for the arrangement of promotional concerts for the winner. The competition’s Second Prize will be €10,000, with a Third Prize of €5,000. Prize winners will also receive career support.

The competitors will perform with Metamorphosen Berlin, members of the Boccherini Trio and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, conducted by Josef Bastian. The twelve competitors selected during the competition’s online preliminary round are:

• Luca Giovannini from Italy
• Johannes Gray from USA
• Christoph Heesch from Germany
• Irena Josifoska from Hungary
• Bumjun Kim from France
• Minji Kim from South Korea
• Jiayi Liu from China
• Keisuke Morita from Japan
• Ivan Skanavi from Russia
• Daniel Thorell from Sweden
• Benett Tsai from Australia
• Maria Zaytseva from Russia

Held every four years from 2002 to 2014, the competition will this year see its fifth iteration open with a concert on 15 November featuring former prize-winners, plus a showtime concert on 18 November featuring cellist and comedian Rebecca Carrington alongside actor Colin Brown. After three public rounds of competition audiences will be treated to concerts by the prize winners on 22 November, which would have been the 120^th birthday of competition namesake, Emanuel Feuermann.

Maestro Daniel Barenboim is one of the competition’s patrons. He said: ‘I hope that this competition awakens in the young cellists something of the musical spirit that Emanuel Feuermann brought into this world.’

You can find out more about the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann here.