The Well-Tempered Ear

Here are winners of major international music competitions in 2023. What’s next?

January 4, 2024
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By Jacob Stockinger

Which young, up-and-coming classical musicians should you keep an eye on during the coming year?

Which ones, if any, will be booked in coming years to performance locally, say, at the Madison Symphony Orchestra, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra and the Wisconsin Union Theater; or at the Salon Piano Series; or as a University of Wisconsin Mead Witter School of Music guest artist?

One guide to 2024 and beyond might be to review the winners of the international music competitions held in 2023.

Thanks to The Violin Channel, here is a list of many such winners who may go on to establish more prominent careers. If you click on the names of the competitions, posted in red, you will be linked to fuller stories about the competitions, many of which you have probably never heard of. The Ear follows many contests but had never heard of many of these.

Here is a link:

You can find out about histories of the competitions, other prize winners, places they are held and how often, jury members and contest rules and formats, and more. And you can hear excerpts from some prestigious competitions including the Bischoff Chamber Music competition and a competition for young child prodigy violinists in Italy. 

At the bottom of the story, you can hear a YouTube video with the 19-year-old, Asian-American pianist Magdelena Ho in her contest-winning performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland. She looks to have a promising future.

The winners came all continents — Asian, Africa, North America, South America and Europe.

And the competitions were held in many different places and focused on many different kinds or genres of classical music: violin, viola, cello, double bass and guitar; piano; saxophone;mharp; percussion and drums; chamber music and symphonic music; conducting; singing; and early music.

At the bottom is a vibrant performance of a familiar Bach suite by Canadian cellist Luka Coetzee who won Finland’s Paulo Competition and also took first prize at the Pablo Casals Competition on 2022.


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Apple Music Classical is now available for iPads

November 18, 2023
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PLEASE HELP THE EAR. IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST, SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE IT or TAG IT (not just “Like” it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event. And you might even attract new readers and subscribers to the blog.

By Jacob Stockinger

Apple Music Classical (logo is below) continues to make headway in the streaming service market.

Originally, it was only available on iPhones with an OS operating system. Then it became available on Google’s Android phones.

As of this week, it is now available on iPad, programmed for bigger formats.

The Ear finds the app particularly useful and cheap for checking out new releases. IT offers more than 5 million recordings.

Some critics complain, however, that the app is still not available for other Mac computers and Apple devices. But one imagines Apple is working on that too even as it continues to buy up other classical music labels. 

The recordings on the Hyperion label are now fully available on the app, thanks to that label’s decision to finally offer streaming. (The Ear particularly likes having accessibility to the recordings of prolific pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Stephen Hough as well as those of violinist Isabelle Faust and cellist Steven Isserlis.) 

The app also now has the complete catalogue of the critically acclaimed Swedish label BIS as well as the Pentatone label it started with.

Here is a story from MacRumors about the technical update, with almost 70 comments and some very good background and tips about how to use it — which you can also find in the YouTube video at the bottom:

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/16/apple-music-classical-comes-to-ipad/

And here are links to previous posts about Apple Music Classical and its release and expansion:

What do you think of Apple Music Classical?

Do you use it or plan to subscribe?

Like it or dislike it?

Why?

The Ear wants to hear.


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