XIX International Chopin Piano Competition

The XIX International Chopin Piano Competition was held from 2 to 23 October 2025 in Warsaw, Poland.
The 2025 competition marked the beginning of the International Chopin Piano Competition's centenary celebrations and drew a record 642 applicants. Following a preliminary round, in which 162 candidates were selected to perform, 85 pianists were admitted to the main stage, including 19 prize-winners of other major piano competitions who qualified directly. The competition proceeded through three solo stages, after which eleven pianists advanced to the final. For the first time, finalists were required to perform the Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61, in addition to one of Chopin's two piano concertos with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.
The competition was won by Eric Lu of the United States, with Kevin Chen of Canada taking second place and Zitong Wang of China third. The jury's verdict was met with some surprise by commentators, as no clear frontrunner had emerged during the competition, in contrast to previous editions. Jury chairman Garrick Ohlsson noted that the deliberations had been long and difficult.

Background

The Chopin Competition is considered Poland's most important musical event and one of the most prestigious piano competitions in the world. Commentators have called the event the "Olympics of the piano world"; Joshua Barone of The New York Times wrote that victory can be "just as glorious as a gold medal". The competition generates a nationwide cultural phenomenon described as "Chopin-mania"; according to the Chopin Institute, tickets released online in October 2024 sold out within 30 minutes, with those for the finals selling out in two minutes. This demand extended to the box office, with hundreds of people queuing for hours, often from before 5 a.m., for a limited number of standby tickets to the daily auditions. Jury member Nelson Goerner called the public's engagement a "kind of national passion", asking, "where else would people queue for hours to hear a dozen pianists perform the same waltz?"
Pianists born between 1995 and 2009 were eligible to participate. A record 642 pianists applied, which Fryderyk Chopin Institute Director Artur Szklener characterized as a sign of both the expanding pool of excellent pianists and the increasing difficulty talented musicians face in forging careers in a commercialized market., who has served as the competition's official photographer since 2005, noted a significant shift in the profile of the participants. He observed that while competitors in 2005 were often at the very beginning of their careers, the pianists in recent editions are "young professionals" who arrive with established careers and use the competition to "consolidate" their standing in the classical music world. The competitor pool also reflected a notable geographical shift, with Asian pianists particularly prominent.

Centenary celebrations

The 2025 edition held special significance as it marked the beginning of the competition's centenary celebrations. The official 100th anniversary falls in 2027, but the Fryderyk Chopin Institute initiated a five-year series of events and projects that began on 2 October 2025 and will culminate with the 20th edition in 2030. Director Artur Szklener said the competition represented "a century of musical heritage, a galaxy of the most outstanding pianists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but also a completely new social phenomenon: a sort of nationwide celebration of Chopin's music".
The centenary prompted a number of accompanying events that transformed Warsaw into a city-wide celebration of the composer. Initiatives included "music lover zones" where audiences could watch live broadcasts; over 30 establishments creating special Chopin-themed menus, desserts, and cocktails; a multimedia laser show set to Chopin's music at the Polish Army Stadium; jazz concerts at Chopin's birthplace in Żelazowa Wola; and a new film, Chopin, a Sonata in Paris, which premiered at the Gdynia Film Festival. Numerous exhibitions were held across the city, including an immersive experience titled "Romantic Chopin", outdoor displays of archival photographs, and a temporary exhibition at the Fryderyk Chopin Museum organized in collaboration with the Musée de la Vie romantique in Paris. Further plans for the 2027 anniversary include a festival in Warsaw featuring past prize-winners, concerts around the world, and a Global Chopin Gala of interconnected concerts spanning time zones from Tokyo to Vancouver.

Russian participants

The 2025 competition was the first held since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Organizers announced that Russian pianists would be admitted only as "individual neutral pianists", a policy the Chopin Institute compared to that for athletes at the Paris Olympics. Participants from Russia were also required to sign a statement condemning the violation of international law. Two pianists, Philipp Lynov and Andrey Zenin, were admitted under these conditions.

Poster competition

An international competition organized by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw selected the poster design for promoting the competition. Fifteen artists submitted a total of 30 entries. The jury, consisting of, Prot Jarnuszkiewicz, Mieczysław Wasilewski, and Artur Szklener, awarded the 40,000 złoty prize to Marcin Władyka. All submitted poster designs were exhibited from 1 to 31 October 2025 at the Academy's Czapski Palace.

Preliminary stage

The preliminary stage was held from 23 April to 4 May 2025 in the Chamber Music Hall of the National Philharmonic in Warsaw. Participants were required to perform the following works:
Ultimately, 642 pianists applied to the competition. Of these, 162 contestants from 28 countries were selected to perform in the preliminary stage, with the jury admitting 66 to the main stage. They were joined by an additional 19 pianists who qualified directly to the main stage by winning major piano competitions. Szklener commented on the exceptionally high and even artistic level of the participants in the preliminary round, stating that the jury found it difficult to make selections from what he described as an "exceptional generation of young artists" from around the world.

Competitor

Country

Result

Masaharu Kambara

Japan

Main stage

The main competition from 3 to 20 October consisted of three stages and a final. An inaugural concert was held on 2 October, and the prize-winners' concerts took place from 21 to 23 October.
The 2025 edition introduced a new system for determining the order of performances. In previous competitions, a single letter drawn by lot would set the alphabetical order for all stages. Citing scientific research on judging in international music competitions, organizers modified the procedure to address a potential disadvantage for those performing earliest. According to Szklener, jurors require time to establish an internal scale for the competition's artistic level, which can result in the first performances serving as a baseline and potentially receiving less precise or favorable evaluations. To ensure greater fairness, the starting letter for the performance order was advanced by six letters of the Latin alphabet for each successive stage, distributing the early performance slots more evenly among the participants.

Program

Participants had to select a different program for each stage of the competition. The competition repertoire had to be played from memory and could be performed in any order. Contestants could not play the same piece twice in different stages of the competition, though they could perform pieces they performed in the preliminary round in the main stage. Participants could use any available edition of Chopin's works, though the Chopin National Edition is recommended.
The 2025 edition introduced the Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61, as a required work in the final alongside the piano concerto. According to Szklener, while the piano concertos provide a virtuosic and grand conclusion, they were written early in Chopin's career and offer a limited view of his compositional style at a crucial decision-making stage of the competition. He described the Polonaise-Fantaisie as standing at the opposite pole from the brilliant idiom of the concertos, characterizing it as one of Chopin's last works with quasi-improvisational, dreamlike, and ethereal qualities, featuring harmonically ambiguous passages with almost impressionistic coloring, blurred polonaise rhythm, and an inverted formal structure in which the principal theme serves as the composition's goal rather than its starting point. Szklener said the juxtaposition allows finalists to present a fuller palette of pianistic means and enables jurors to assess their maturity, while the form of the Polonaise-Fantaisie allows for a cohesive artistic narrative in which it paves the way for the concerto, referencing the tradition of the improvised prelude.
Other program changes for 2025 included the addition of a waltz in the first round. Szklener noted that Chopin's waltzes require not just understanding but a profound sense of the gestures of couples on a dance floor. The change also enabled competitors to perform the complete set of 24 Preludes, Op. 28, during the second round. While the complete set could have been played during the previous two competitions in the third round instead of a sonata, the 2025 rules restored the obligatory status of the sonata in the semifinal while extending the maximum duration of the second-round recital to 50 minutes. Szklener expressed satisfaction that 20 participants opted to perform the complete set of preludes, calling the preludes a genre in which Chopin combined references to Bach with a modern compositional approach, investing miniature forms with diverse pianistic and emotional content while transferring architectural relations to the level of the set as a whole.