The Concours de Genève reaches its 80th edition in November with its conducting competition back after more than 30 years and its composition final folded into it: three brand new orchestral works, performed by three young conductors who will not learn which piece they are conducting until days before they walk onto the podium at the Victoria Hall. Secretary General Didier Schnorhk speaks to Juliette Barber about the risks of the format, funding that follows projects rather than institutions, the gender gap in conducting, and why he has already started thinking about what comes next
This November marks the 80th edition of the Concours de Genève. Can you explain what this milestone means to you?
Yes, it is the 80th competition, not the 80th anniversary of the institution. We were founded in 1939, so we are older than that, but we don’t count the years of the Second World War, when it was a national competition rather than an international one. I am fairly sure we are not the oldest competition by foundation, but I do think we have the most editions of any competition in the world. That ought to count for something, so for this anniversary we wanted to mark it differently.
Conducting returns this year for the first time since 1994, when Alan Gilbert took the top prize. The Concours de Genève has only staged it three times before, in 1978, 1984 and 1994. Why bring it back now?
It is a discipline we have not run for more than 30 years, and it is not easy to organise, which is why this is only the fourth time. The 1994 edition was a great success because we had a wonderful first prize winner in Alan Gilbert, who went on to a major career at the New York Philharmonic. That mattered to us, because we do not produce laureates with careers of that size every year. So there was a strong reason behind organising a new conducting competition. I don’t know what will happen this time, of course, but we have some history behind us.
The other reason was that we wanted to celebrate the anniversary with our long-term partner, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. It has been the competition’s main partner since the very beginning, and it matters to us to do things together. And in a conducting competition, the orchestra is the main character.
The competition has been spread across two years, with the first rounds in 2025 and the semi-finals and finals this November. Candidates work up through the Orchestre de la HEM, the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève and Ensemble Contrechamps before reaching the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Why structure it that way?
Spreading it over two years gave us time for a bigger programme with different orchestras, and it means the Suisse Romande is the summit rather than the starting point. The candidates all tell me that what interested them most was the chance to conduct the Suisse Romande in Geneva, in the Victoria Hall, and particularly in the piece we chose, Debussy’s La Mer. This is Ernest Ansermet’s orchestra, and playing Debussy in Geneva is part of its history. That is very specific to this place, and it makes it special. I think the young ones are very much looking forward to it.
This edition merges the composition and conducting finals. On 11 November the three composition finalists’ works will be performed by the three conducting finalists, with the pairings drawn by lot. Where did the idea come from, and are you the first competition to do this?
I am not completely certain, but I believe it is the first time a competition has combined two disciplines in the same final. Composition has been central to us since 2010, when it became one of the main disciplines we run every two years, and it radiates into everything else we do. New music is a defining feature of this competition, so for the anniversary, bringing the two together made sense.
We hesitated a great deal, because it is not an easy thing to do. Three pieces written by very young composers, conducted by very young conductors. They will have a professional orchestra in front of them, which helps, but it is still a real challenge. These are new works, so there is no reference for them, and nobody knows how they should sound. Each conductor has to find their own way into music that may be unlike anything they have worked on before.
For me it is the highest point of the whole competition, this merging of two disciplines. I like the idea, and I think it is beautiful. And it is something young conductors need to be able to do, because these days you cannot build a career without being able to conduct new music.
You brought the six conducting semi-finalists together with the three composition finalists and Pascal Rophé last May. How did that work, and when do the conductors find out which piece has been allocated to them?
We decided to help them. We put them all in a room with Pascal Rophé, who is a very experienced conductor of contemporary music, and they went through all three scores together: what matters in them, what doesn’t, what the music is asking for. They learned a great deal from it, and I am now confident the competition will be a great success and everyone will have a wonderful evening.
As for the draw, we ask them all to prepare the pieces without knowing which one they will conduct. They only find out when they arrive in Geneva, on the official drawing day. It is complicated, because we have six semi-finalists and only three of them will conduct these works, so we really don’t know yet. We have to wait for the three finalists to be chosen.
That evening counts towards the conducting prize as well as deciding the composition prize, with a second conducting final two days later, and a semi-final in three parts before that.
How are the conductors assessed across it all, and is Unsuk Chin the only juror involved in both competitions?
The three parts of the semi-final are taken together to decide which three conductors go through. Those three then have two finals. The first is the evening with the new compositions, and two days later they conduct a more standard orchestral programme with the Suisse Romande, drawn from a predefined list.
Unsuk Chin is the only person who sits on both juries, so she is the link between the composition and the conducting sides. She is not there for the semi-finals and joins the conducting jury only for the final stage.
The entries had to be for symphony orchestra, without soloists or electronics, though candidates could add two instruments of their choosing. How strictly did you hold to that, and is generative AI something you now have to think about?
We were strict in our rules. The orchestral setup was written down, so nobody could add anything very strange. They had two jokers, so some put in an accordion, or extra percussion, which is very common, or an additional keyboard.
A lot of what came in was very traditional classical music, which did not interest us, so it was eliminated quickly. The three the jury selected each proposed a different way of playing with the orchestra, from the simplest to the most complex. One of them asks the players to use other instruments altogether: the trombones have to play small ocarinas; the flutes play toy flutes. I have no idea what that will sound like in real life. But it is all playable, because for a professional orchestra these are things they can do, and they are not very difficult.
On artificial intelligence, we did look at it. We discussed it with the jury and asked whether they thought it might have been used in some of the submissions. They thought not, and that they would have noticed. I am less certain, and I cannot confirm it clearly either way. Perhaps you could use it for some repeating passages, but for the composing, I don’t think so.
Your career development programme gives laureates two years of support, built around touring, representation and a recording. How does that translate for a composer or a conductor?
It is not the same as for a pianist or a cellist, because we are not looking for the same things. For conductors the aim is engagements with orchestras. We don’t have fixed agreements with a lot of orchestras, but we invite many orchestra directors to the competition, and it works that way. For composers it is entirely different. What they need is new commissions. We have two or three things already scheduled, and after that our job is to help them find more.
In truth the programme is based more on personal conversation and coaching than on a volume of concerts and pre-arranged dates. We work individually with prize winners to help them work out what they actually want to do. It is not the quantity, it is the quality of the relationship, and how they become real artists: how you define what you want to achieve in your life, how you work out who you really are and what makes you different from everybody else. We want them to think about themselves. That is true even for the pianists and the cellists. It was never about the number of concerts.
We also run the personal artistic project, which has its own prize. We ask the conductors, for example, to propose an artistic project of their own, and then we help the finalists realise it. It might be a concert on a particular theme, a tour or a recording. We don’t pay for everything, and it is not really about the money. It is about helping them make it concrete, finding the people who can help, the venues, the orchestra if they need one. We do have some money to spend, but the point is to help them realise one of their dreams. That becomes an important thing in their artistic life.
When we spoke in 2024 you said funders were increasingly drawn to specific projects rather than to the institution. Is that still the case?
Yes. We have general funding from the public authorities, which keeps us going as an institution and covers administration, and a main partnership with a large Geneva foundation for general activities. But we still have to find around a third of the total budget privately, and that money almost always arrives in support of particular projects. Very often it is the career development programme, or a concert, or the mediation work between the music and new audiences.
You always have to find a way of interesting people. We also have a foundation that supports the composition competition specifically, because their own rules require them to support that kind of competition, which is very lucky for us, and I hope it lasts.
In 2027 you are adding baroque violin alongside piano, in partnership with Geneva’s new early-music venue La Cité Bleue. It is a ninth discipline and your first move into historically informed performance. What prompted this?
I don’t know whether it will stay permanently. We are testing it, but if it works, we may continue, and it might not be violin next time. It could be a harpsichord competition. The idea was to open the door to baroque music and the historically informed way of playing.
We are doing it in partnership with La Cité Bleue and Cappella Mediterranea and with Leonardo García Alarcón, who is a conductor and harpsichordist himself. They are experts in this field, and we are experts in competitions, so together we can do something special. That is a real change for us. You cannot know everything, and you need people who know what they are doing.
I am confident it will be a significant event, because I think it is the first time a competition of our size has done something in early music. There are baroque competitions, but they are specialised and small. We are a big competition with a big audience, and I hope it will be a game changer for this part of the musical world. We shall see.
Of the 168 applicants to the conducting competition, 36 were women, and one reached the semi-finals. How does that sit with you?
This is an issue specific to conducting, and I regret that we had only one woman among the semi-finalists. Moreover, she unfortunately decided to withdraw from the competition just recently. But the main problem is that, to begin with, women made up only a quarter of the entrants; statistically therefore, it was difficult to achieve a balanced outcome by the end of the competition. I had hoped there would be at least two in the semi-finals. I cannot fault the jury, however, as there were plenty of women among its members.
So there is still a lot of work to do, and it is a goal. We need to improve, and in several disciplines. But it is not a problem in piano, where we usually have roughly an even split, and it was the same last year in the viola competition, where the final was two women and one man. It is not a question of instruments. Conducting is a different world, and everybody knows there is still a great deal to do on gender equality in conducting everywhere. In 10 years, I think we will look back on this and find it ridiculous. But we are not there yet.
You are only the third secretary general since 1939 and have been in post since 1999. Have you begun to think about when to step down?
It is a legitimate question, and of course I don’t intend to die in the job. I will still be here next year, but at some point after that I have to stop. It is a matter of finding the right moment for everybody. My concern is that the competition stays in good health for as long as possible. I am 64 now. It may be a few more years, we shall see. But it will not come as a surprise to anyone when I step down, and somebody young and new arrives with a lot of fresh ideas.
And finally, what are you proudest of so far?
Keeping Geneva among the best and most recognised competitions was a real goal and a real achievement. Beyond that, the fact that we now have a composition competition matters enormously to me, and so does the career development programme, because when I started neither existed. It was a very traditional competition, and it was not in good health at the time, so there was a great deal of work simply to secure its foundations, and that took me years. Now I think we have achieved a lot. We have had wonderful prize winners and new programmes. That is something I am proud of.
The 80th Concours de Genève takes place from 6 to 13 November 2026. To find out more, visit concoursgeneve.ch