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Ten Orchestras Opened Their Season With Mahler. Between Them They Played the First Symphony Through the Sixth, With No Gaps.
Cadenza checked the opening night of 65 orchestras on four continents and read 32 local reviews in eight languages. Twenty-eight of the concerts have already been played. Ten of those chose a Mahler symphony, and between them they covered the First through the Sixth with no gaps. Five opened with music nobody had heard before. Four conductors began a tenure. Sixteen American orchestras have not yet played a note.
We Counted Every Jazz Funding Scheme We Could Verify From 2026. Six American Programmes Alone Come to $3.5 Million.
Wigmore Hall Is Giving Away More Than Five Thousand Free Tickets to Under-25s. That Covers a Third of Everything It Programmes.
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A French Sextet Won the Group Competition at Getxo and Took €4,500. Their Pianist Won Best Soloist on Top of It.New
Lurium took first prize at the 49th Getxo Jazz Festival's group competition in the Basque Country, with a live CD recording attached. Levi Harvey also won Best Soloist. Cadenza adds up the competition purse and finds a figure circulating that does not match it.
He Wrote His Debut Album Over Five Years, Some of It in Hospital. Ten Per Cent of Every Copy Sold Goes Back to the Charity.New
Connor Sobieri, 23, releases First Steps on 21 October, seventeen months after graduating from NYU and having played Dizzy's Club, Birdland, The Appel Room and NuBlu in between. He is giving a tenth of all proceeds to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation.
Two American Institutions Gave $1.3 Million to Sixteen Veteran Jazz Musicians This Year. One of the Cheques Was for $100,000, With No Conditions.New
The Mellon Foundation and the Jazz Foundation of America named twelve Jazz Legacies Fellows at $100,000 each, unrestricted. The National Endowment for the Arts named four Jazz Masters at $25,000 each, and honours them at a concert in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Cadenza added it up.
He Has Played Trombone in the Met Pit Since 2005. On 21 September He Starts Running Jazz at Lincoln Center.New
Weston Sprott becomes Executive Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center this month, arriving from seven years as Dean of Juilliard's Preparatory Division and twenty-one seasons in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He is walking into one half of a leadership structure that did not exist a year ago.
The First Prize in York Is a Recording Contract, Not Money. An Ensemble Founded Two Years Ago Won It.New
The Lyons Mouth, formed in 2024 by singers who met at the University of York, won the 2026 York International Young Artists Competition: a Linn Records contract, a paid festival concert and BBC Radio 3 sessions. Four of the nine finalist ensembles were Swiss.
A Competition Named After a Tenor Gave Its Six Prizes to No Tenors. Ukrainian Singers Took the Top Three.New
The 63rd Concurso Internacional de Canto Tenor Viñas drew a record 712 applicants from 64 countries and announced its verdict in Barcelona on 16 January. Not one of the six official laureates is a tenor. Cadenza also found the competition awarded a standalone Oratorio-Lied prize for the first time.
One Composer Read 112 Scores and Chose Four. That Is the Entire Judging Process of the Takemitsu Award.New
Jörg Widmann was the sole judge of the 2026 Toru Takemitsu Composition Award, which drew 112 orchestral scores from 25 countries and gave ¥3,000,000 to four composers. Entry is free, the works must be unperformed, and the final concert is therefore four world premieres in one evening.
Twelve Cellists Reached the Queen Elisabeth Final. All Twelve Were Paid, and Six of Them Have No Rank at All.New
Ettore Pagano, 23, won the 2026 Queen Elisabeth cello competition: EUR 25,000 and a four-year loan of the 1733 Gofriller 'Casals' cello. Cadenza added up what the other eleven finalists received, and found a prize structure built so that nobody finishes twelfth.
Ayumu Ibaraki Won Two Prizes in One Night in Jaén. Together They Are Forty Per Cent of Everything the Competition Paid Out.New
The 67th Premio Jaén went to a 29-year-old Japanese pianist who also took the separate Romantic Music Prize, making €28,000 from a total pool of €70,000. He is the fifth Japanese winner in the competition's history. No mainstream English-language outlet has reported it.
Roman Fediurko Won Takamatsu in March and Took a Rubinstein Medal in September. He Also Collected Four of Seven Special Prizes Along the Way.New
The pianist, born in Kyiv in 2004 and studying in Graz, won the 6th Takamatsu International Piano Competition outright against a field aged 16 to 35, then placed third at the Arthur Rubinstein in Tel Aviv six months later. Cadenza read the Japanese results portal and counted what he actually took home.
We Counted Two Hundred and One Competition Winners From 2026. Only a Third of Them Have a Published Age.New
Cadenza set out to find every 2026 competition winner it could tie to a primary source, across ten regions and disciplines. Two hundred and one names survived verification. The distribution is lopsided, and the single most basic fact about a winner is missing two times out of three.
Bridget Conley Went From a Training Fellowship Straight Into a Named Principal Chair. Almost Nobody Does That.New
The St Louis Symphony has appointed Conley Principal Tuba and holder of the Lesley A. Waldheim Chair for 2026-27, moving her directly from a New World Symphony fellowship. Cadenza set her competition winnings against what her degrees cost, and looked at how rarely a first professional job is a principal chair.
One Hundred and Seventy-Three Conductors Applied. Nine Got to Wave a Stick, and Filippo Barsali Went Home With 30,000 Francs.New
Liechtenstein held its first conducting competition in Vaduz in June, and the principality's own figures make it one of the steepest funnels in the profession. Cadenza ran the odds the competition publishes but nobody has framed: a 5.2 per cent chance of even being invited, and a prize that arrives two years before the concert attached to it.
Germany Loaned Out Thirty-Four Historic String Instruments in One Weekend. The Youngest Player to Get One Is Twelve.New
The 33rd competition of the Deutscher Musikinstrumentenfonds ran over three days in Lübeck in February and put a 1703 Stradivari, a 1756 Guadagnini, an 1810 Lupot and a Grancino cello from about 1700 into the hands of students. Cadenza read the official award list, which almost nobody has, and worked out the odds and the instrument-to-player age ratios.
The Concertgebouw's Newest Job Is Two Years Old and Has Had Two Holders. The First One Just Left to Run an Orchestra.New
Stepan Armasar, born in 2000, takes over as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's Bernard Haitink Associate Conductor this month. He won the Toscanini competition last year as its youngest entrant. Cadenza looked at what happened to the only person who has held the post before him, because that is the entire available evidence on whether it works.
Jonathan Tetelman Sings Werther, Samson and Radamès in One Season. Those Three Roles Are Not Usually the Same Voice.New
The Chilean-American tenor's 2026-27 season takes two role debuts, Samson at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Radamès in a new Houston Aida, while he also sings a new Munich Werther. Cadenza laid his last two seasons out by vocal weight. The span is remarkable, and it is the most interesting question in his career.
Naples and Buenos Aires Signed a Five-Year Opera Agreement in the Salón Dorado. The Deadline That Matters Is 2037.New
On 8 September the Teatro di San Carlo and the Teatro Colón signed a cooperation agreement covering co-productions, artists, stage crew and young musicians. Neither theatre has published a word about it. Cadenza read the Italian government's release and found a ten-year plan hiding inside a five-year deal, and an anniversary that is a year out in its own founding law.
Six Musicians Just Won Money to Go and Study Abroad. The Society Paying for It Has Sent One Musician to America in Four Years.New
The Royal Philharmonic Society named its 2026 Isserlis Scholars on 10 September: six young musicians, £22,500, and destinations in Paris, Copenhagen, Kronberg, Bergen, Mondovì and Lübeck. Cadenza tallied every award the society has made since 2023. Germany alone took ten of twenty-four, German-speaking Europe took exactly half, and the United States took one.
The Royal Philharmonic Says Interest in Orchestral Music Is at a Six-Year Peak. By Its Own Published Measure It Is an Eight-Year High.New
The RPO's annual tracking research, published on 10 September, puts UK interest in attending a classical or orchestral concert at 89 per cent, up from 79 in 2018. Cadenza read the whole series and found the orchestra has under-labelled its own record, and that the crossover between classical and film audiences runs in one direction only.
A Novara Nun Dedicated Her Twelfth Book of Motets to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1686. Badajoz Plays Two of Them on Sunday.New
The 31st Festival de Música Sacra y Antigua de Badajoz opens on 12 September, and on the 13th a soprano and two players give two motets by Isabella Leonarda in the cathedral. The festival calls one of them a first performance in modern times. Cadenza found the source, and it is not the lost manuscript the story has been told as.
A Salaried Principal Cellist Beat a Field of Teenagers in Bucharest. The 19-Year-Old He Beat Went Home With All But €2,000 of First Prize.New
Samuel Niederhauser, 28, principal cellist of the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, won the cello section of the 2026 George Enescu International Competition on 7 September. Cadenza added up the whole prize pool and then added up what the applicants paid to enter it. Entry fees covered 59 per cent of every euro the competition paid out.
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