The Concours Géza Anda 2024 will be held between 30th May and 8th June in Zurich and Winterthur. It is open to participants from all countries who are born after 30th May 1992.

Mozart Semi-Final with Musikkollegium Winterthur conducted by Mikhail Pletnev.

Final Concert with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra conducted by Paavo Järvi.

Among the countless competitions, the Concours Géza Anda is a unique and extraordinary institution in international comparison – and this is not only due to the high-ranking jury, which is staffed with outstanding representatives of the music world. What is special about the Concours Géza Anda piano competition is above all that the representative act of the final concert and the considerable prize money are not enough. The Géza Anda Foundation commits itself to the winners to accompany them as a mentor for three years and, among other things, to provide performance opportunities.

Géza Anda was admitted to the famous Liszt Academy in Budapest at the age of just thirteen, and received his training from its legendary professors of the time such as Ernst von Dohnányi and Léo Weiner. A scholarship then enabled him to continue his studies in Berlin. Anda managed to emigrate to Switzerland during the Second World War, and from then on made this country his home. But his career took him across all of Europe and on repeated tours to the USA, Japan, Korea and South Africa. He performed with all the great conductors from Fricsay to Abbado and Boulez.

Géza Anda’s approach to music was shaped by the typically broad training provided by the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and was determined by a rational, extremely detailed, lucid analysis of the musical text at hand. Both as a performing musician and as a teacher, he placed importance on the most exact examination of the score before then setting himself free of it in order to attain a highly individual, personal interpretation of the music: “If you want to interpret a work, you can’t learn it”, he said; “you have to become completely at one with it”.

Géza Anda is best known for his committed advocacy of the piano concertos of Bartók and Mozart. He gave more than 300 public performances of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, and his recording of all three remains the benchmark for them today. He was the first pianist to record all of Mozart’s piano concertos, directing them from the keyboard. But these cycles form only a small part of Anda’s vast discography and barely reflect his broad repertoire, which ranged from Bach to Rachmaninov and in the 1950s also encompassed contemporary music.

The Géza Anda-Foundation was created in 1978 in memory of the Hungarian-Swiss pianist Géza Anda, who had passed away two years earlier. The foundation engages in the support of young pianists in the musical spirit of Géza Anda. In addition to numerous other projects, its main focus is the organisation of a triennial international piano competition in Zurich – the Géza Anda Competition.

In addition to organising the Concours Géza Anda international piano competition every three years in Zurich, the Géza Anda Foundation is also involved in other ways in promoting young pianists and, in particular, in enabling the laureates of previous competitions to present themselves to the public. This includes numerous projects and events which are arranged with various partner organisations or realised jointly.