In what order will the participants perform during the Competition?

During the Competition, participants will perform in alphabetical order according to the first letter of their surname. The letter with which the 1st stage begins will be decided by a draw. This year, the letter will be drawn during the conference inaugurating the Competition on September 30 at 5 p.m. (this exciting moment will be broadcast online on the YouTube channel of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute).

Until now, the letter drawn was used as the starting letter for each subsequent stage, but this unintentionally favoured or disadvantaged some pianists. Research shows that participants performing at the beginning of a stage have slightly lower chances of receiving a high score than the others. If, for example, Jan Kowalski had to perform first in the 1st stage and then happily advanced to the next rounds, he had to start the auditions each time, facing less favourable conditions and, as a result, greater stress. New provisions have been introduced in the rules of this year’s edition to address this issue. Namely, after drawing the letter that starts the 1st stage, the second stage will feature participants whose names begin with a letter that is 6 letters away from the drawn letter (i.e., to stick with our Jan, if K were drawn, the second stage will start with R), and in the third stage, the letters will be 6 places further away, so that after 4 stages, all 24 letters of the Latin alphabet will be covered. 

Of course, the current performance schedule will always be available on our website, monitored and corrected in case of any changes resulting, for example, from random events.