The top prizes were won by Austrian violinist Leonhard Baumgartner and Romanian violinist Constantin Stefan Cristian
The finals of the fifth Ilona Fehér International Violin Competition took place on 12–13 July at the Liszt Academy’s Solti Hall in Budapest, Hungary. The competition was organised by the Festival Academy Budapest and was open to violinists of all nationalities under the age of 22, with candidates divided into two age categories.
In the first category, for violinists under the age of 15, the first prize of €2,000 was awarded to Romanian violinist Constantin Stefan Cristian. Second prize of €1,250 went to Japanese violinist Hana Hoshino, and third prize of €750 to Swiss violinist Kimia Corke.
In the second category, for violinists aged 15–22, the first prize of €2,000 was won by Austrian violinist Leonhard Baumgartner. The second prize of €1,500 was awarded to Ukrainian violinist Maksym Synytskyi, and the third prize of €1,000 to Taiwanese violinist Tao-Yuan Hsiao.
All finalists performed concertos with the Anima Musicae Chamber Orchestra without a conductor.
The Festival Academy Budapest also commissioned contemporary works to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust, with special prizes in the competition for the best performance of each work. Baumgartner won the prize for the best performance of Máté Balogh’s A Lament of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah; Cristian for Máté Bella’s The White Chaconne; Synytsky for Péter Tornyai’s Stolperstein; and Corke for Shlomo Mintz’s In Memory.
Further special prizes awarded included the prize for the youngest competitor, which was awarded to Chinese violinist Lin Xi, and the prize for the Best Bartók Duos, which was awarded to Chinese violinist Zhang Hinger and British violinist Henry Jin Quan.
The competition was founded in 2017 by Hungarian violinists Katalin Kokas and Barnabás Kelemen, the artistic directors of the Festival Academy Budapest, and was named for the great twentieth century Hungarian violinist Ilona Fehér. This year’s jury comprised Kelemen, Alissa Margulis, György Pauk, Qian Zhou, Dora Schwarzberg, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Magdalena Ursu, and Andreas Vierziger, with Shlomo Mintz as president of the jury.
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