Six Competition Deadlines Before Christmas, Checked at Source. Starting With the Ones Our Own Board Had Wrong.

A competition has two dates that matter and they are usually months apart. There is the date the competition happens, which is the one on the poster, in the press release and at the top of the website. And there is the date applications close, which is the one that decides whether you are in it, and which is normally three paragraphs down a regulations page or inside a PDF.

Almost every calendar in this field prints the first date. Musicians need the second.

So we went and checked. Six of the biggest windows in classical music close between now and the new year, and below are the dates, fees, age limits and prize funds, each read off the organiser's own page on 7 September 2026. Then we checked our own listings against the same pages, and the results were bad enough that they are printed here too.

The six that close before Christmas

One more is opening rather than closing. The Queen Elisabeth Competition's 2027 session is for voice, runs from 9 May to 2 June 2027 in Brussels, and is open to singers aged between 18 and 30. Its own page says applications "will open in October 2026" and does not yet publish a closing date, so the thing to do is watch it rather than diarise it.

A note on the Cleveland entry, because it is instructive. The competition's own page lists its final round as "August 4 – 8, 2024". Every other date on the page is 2027. Organisers make these mistakes too, which is the whole reason for checking a date against more than one line of a single web page.

Then we checked ourselves

Cadenza's competitions board carried 73 listings on 7 September. Twenty-five of them have a date in the deadline field. We took six of those, the ones a musician is most likely to act on, and compared each against the organiser's own page.

All six were the date the competition starts, not the date applications close.

A musician using that board to plan a year would have missed the Leeds deadline by ten months and the Wieniawski by eight, and would have prepared for a Kreisler competition that is not happening this year.

The rest of the board's condition is no better and worth stating: only 25 of the 73 rows carry any deadline at all, only eight state a fee, only eight state a prize fund, and eleven competitions appear twice under identical titles. The underlying fault is now filed as a fix in the site's repository, and the corrected dates in the table above are the ones we will be loading.

Why this happens everywhere

It is worth understanding the mechanism, because it will keep producing wrong dates on every calendar that scrapes rather than reads.

An organiser's homepage leads with the competition. That is the event, the thing worth promoting, and it is marked up as the page's headline date. The application deadline sits in the regulations, often inside a PDF, sometimes only in the entry form itself. Any system that takes the most prominent date on the page takes the wrong one, every time, and does so silently, because a plausible future date does not look like an error.

The tell is the gap. When a listed deadline falls in the same week as the competition, or after it, the field is holding the wrong date. That is a rule any musician can apply to any calendar, including this one.

The second lesson is about fees, which almost nobody publishes in a form you can compare. Cleveland is the model: $150 before 4 November, $200 after it, printed on the same page as the deadline, a $50 penalty for a month's hesitation. Verbier states €75. Leeds is the trap. Its regulations describe three tiers, a reduced early rate, a standard rate and "a higher non-refundable fee" for late applications, and print no amounts at all. The amounts do exist, but not on leedspiano.com: they sit on the Acceptd portal behind the Apply button, at £150 to 30 September, £200 to 31 October and £250 to 7 November. An applicant who reads the regulations and stops there never sees the £100 spread. A student sending off six applications is committing real money, and on most aggregated calendars, ours included, none of it is visible at all.

If you are applying

• By 5 October: Opera Crown video applications, for the competition in Tbilisi in November.
• By 30 September: Leeds at the £150 early rate. The same application costs £200 from 1 October and £250 in the late window.
• By 31 October: Leeds at £200, at 23:59 GMT. Late applications are taken until 7 November at £250, and nothing after that. The first round is played in seven cities in spring, so the audition may be closer to home than the final.
• By 4 November: Cleveland at $150. After that the same application costs $200.
• 2 to 30 November: Mirjam Helin, closing at 4 p.m. Finnish time, for a competition held in Turku for the first time.
• By 4 December: Cleveland's standard deadline.
• By 14 December, 23:59 EST: Verbier Festival Orchestra live auditions; 11 January 2027 for video.
• October, watch: the Queen Elisabeth opens its voice applications and has not published a closing date.

Cadenza lists competitions, festivals and academies alongside salaried vacancies, free to musicians, on its jobs and programmes board, and the audition chairs closing this month are in this month's ledger.

We have corrected our own six and published the working. The question is for everyone else who runs a calendar in this field, ourselves included until the fix lands: when a musician misses a deadline because a listing showed the concert date instead, whose mistake is that?

Sources, all read on 7 September 2026: Leeds International Piano Competition, 2027 competition; Cleveland International Piano Competition, 2027; Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition and its Turku page; Queen Elisabeth Competition, Voice 2027 and its application page; Opera Crown, Tbilisi Opera House; OperaWire on the Opera Crown jury and prize fund; Verbier Festival Orchestra guidelines; Cadenza listings API, competitions lane.

Cover photograph: Leeds Town Hall, where the Leeds International Piano Competition plays its concerto finals in September 2027. Applications close on 31 October 2026. Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.