The official final concert of the newly established competition – organised under the patronage of André Schmitz, the Permanent Secretary for Culture of the Berlin Senate – took place in Schöneberg Town Hall in November 2007.
The initiative to create a platform for students and teachers to present and evaluate both compositional and instrumental achievements came from the pianist and teacher Elżbieta Sternlicht, who has long been known in Berlin’s classical concert scene for her spectacular concerts of modern piano music.
The result was overwhelming (…) and the list of contenders long. A special discovery was the young pianist Filip Roch Januchowski (piano class E. Sternlicht). (…)
This competition for new music – for which we owe thanks to the great personal commitment of its initiator Elżbieta Sternlicht – is a necessary sapling in the already thick forest of traditional competitions.
Adelheid Krause-Pichler
nmz, June 2008