The Preisner Scoring Competition is an international composition contest for young creators of film and illustrative music, held under the artistic direction of Polish film music great, Zbigniew Preisner. The event serves as a prestigious space for exchanging ideas and fostering dialogue between young composers and leading figures from the global film and music industries.
The premiere edition of the Preisner Scoring Competition concluded on Saturday in Bielsko-Biała, southern Poland - and Poland’s Zofia Michałowicz was unveiled as its winner.
A graduate in piano performance from a secondary music school, Michałowicz has had no formal training in composition. She is a student at the Medical Faculty of the Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński University in Warsaw.
She received EUR 25,000 in prize money, alongside a wide range of career-development opportunities.
An international jury, chaired by the event's patron Zbigniew Preisner, also comprised Australian singer and composer of the iconic band Dead Can Dance - Lisa Gerrard, Spanish filmmaker and writer Fernando Trueba, Mexican actor and producer Michel Duval, and American singer and songwriter Matthew Sweet.
Gerard praised all finalists for "an incredible imagination and diversity of timbral solutions employed in their pieces".
Participants in the competition were expected to submit a 10- to 15-minute piece inspired by The Tower of Babel, the famous 16th-century painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Out of 81 works by young composers from across the world submitted to a selection panel, ten qualified for the final round. Six of the finalists represented Poland, two Germany, and one each - Hungary and the United Arab Emirates.
Zbigniew Preisner, 71, is one of Europe’s leading composers of film music. He owes his reputation primarily to his soundtracks to Three Colours Trilogy, the Decalogue series, and The Double Life of Veronique by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. His output also includes scores to features by other leading European directors, as well as several large-scale compositions.
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