About XVIII Chopin Competition Edition

October 2021 was marked by the 18th Chopin Competition. At that time, Warsaw became the piano capital of the world, while the emotions connected with the young pianists’ struggle were experienced by the community of music lovers across the globe. According to analytical studies by research centres: the Institute of Media Monitoring and ‘PRESS-SERVICE Media Monitoring’, the reach of last year’s Chopin Competition has never been so huge. Celebrating the anniversary, as one year ago the first stage of the 18th Chopin Competition started, we present selected statistics on this international piano feast.

Broadcast channels The 18th Chopin Competition, was available through several broadcast channels:

• the Chopin2020.pl website;
• the Chopin Competition mobile application for smartphones and SmartTv;
• The Chopin Institute channel on YouTube;
• the Chinese social platform Weibo;
• TV broadcast on TVP Kultura;
• radio broadcast on Polish Radio Channel 2 and Radio Chopin;
• social media (including Facebook of The Chopin Institute in six languages, Instagram of The Chopin Institute).

Broadcasts of the Competition’s audition sessions – a total of almost 2,000 interpretations of Fryderyk Chopin’s compositions – were available on all channels. For the first time ever, they were broadcast in 4K quality.

The Chopin2020.pl platform and the Chopin Competition application offered viewers additional materials: in addition to biographies of the 87 participants in the Competition, it featured interviews with the young pianists, jurors and journalists, photo galleries from all stages, the Competition spot Talent is Only the Beginning, photo reports and recordings from accompanying events, including the series of master recitals Before the Grand Competition, and archival photographs from the previous 17 editions of the Competition.

The official Competition website Chopin2020.pl has had nearly 1,000,000 views. The Competition app was downloaded as many as 70,000 times.

Broadcasts

Similarly to 2015, the materials posted on The Chopin Institute’s YouTube channel had the highest reach. In October, they were viewed 37,500,000 times, which equates to almost 8 million hours when added up. This is almost 880 years of uninterrupted viewing and more than four times as much as during the 17th Chopin Competition. The largest number of listeners had Kyohei Sorita’s performance of the concerto in the final stage: it has been viewed 4,800,000 times to date!

Although the listeners of the Competition were sometimes thousands of kilometres apart (more than 50% of viewers were Japanese, and the broadcasts were also popular in Poland, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan), they formed a community united by the experience of the competition. The engagement is evidenced by the comments left during the viewing (at its peak, there were more than 20 per second!) and the live concert viewing – nearly 62,000 viewers followed the broadcast at one point.

The total rating of the broadcast on Weibo, available in China, was as high as 4,500,000 views.

The Polish Television, mainly TVP Kultura, broadcast a total of 147 hours of auditions, concerts and interviews with experts. The prizewinners’ concert broadcast on TVP1, TVP Kultura and TVP Polonia on 21 October was watched by approximately 1,800,000 people (more than twice as many as during the previous edition of the Competition), while the stations’ shares increased by 96.4% compared to the previous year.

Media coverage

Almost all information about the 18th Chopin Competition was made available via the Internet. News portals and social media were the most effective. In October alone, the number of posts on Polish social media amounted to 17,900 – mostly tweets. These publications generated a reach of 67,000,000 recipients and provoked 930,000 interactions. The record-breaking post on The Chopin Institute’s Facebook page had a reach of one million recipients.

A large number of publications related to the Competition were also recorded on Polish Radio and TVP Info stations. These media had a high direct reach rate.

With approximately 65,000 different publications about the Competition in Poland and around the world, more than 915,000,000 interactions were recorded. The advertising equivalent of the aforementioned publications was determined by the Press Service to be a total of PLN 157,262,655 net according to the AVE coefficient. According to Press Service research, none of the nearly 70,000 communications about the event was negative.

Awards

The Fryderyk Chopin Institute has been awarded the prestigious Cremona Musica Award for communication at the 18th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. The jury appreciated the Chopin Institute for ‘setting new standards in communication with an exceptional quality of streaming and an innovative approach to disseminating information about classical music, the Chopin Competition and it’s participants. It allowed millions of people to share the joy of Chopin’s music and thus created a very special atmosphere and energy of the event.’ The jury also appreciated ‘the empathy and humanity with which the Chopin Competition was organised.’

The award was presented at a gala concert in Museo del Violino in Cremona on Saturday, 24 September, which featured Martín García García, a prizewinner of the 2021 edition of the Chopin Competition.

Artur Szklener, Director of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, expressed his joy when receiving the award:

‘We are very happy that our communication efforts have been noticed. It is a great honour to receive this award in the place where the heart of the violin is beating for the whole world. Our mission is not only to find the best interpreters of Chopin’s music but to open as many hearts as we can and share great music with them. We are proud that tens of thousands came to Warsaw to follow the Chopin Competition live and that millions worldwide followed it online. We strongly believe that only working together the classical musical community will be able to make this world a better place for music and simply for all of us, humans.’.