enCORE Accelerando: Announcing the Winners

The first edition of the enCORE Accelerando took place in Budapest, Hungary from May 10th to 12th 2022, bringing together 9 exceptional projects from young classical musicians from 8 countries to present their ideas for the future of the genre. The jury composed of David Zsoldos (JM Hungary), Julien Beurms (JM Wallonie-Bruxelles), Bogdana Bushevska (JM Macedonia), Michael Christensen (JM Denmark) and Ricardo Van Mildert (MoonJelly Agency) awarded three phenomenal projects that focus on uncovering new ways in classical music from around the world.

enCORE Classical is an global platform brought to you by JM International that is dedicated to empowering young classical musicians. It provides support, training and inspiration to further the professional development of young classically trained musicians working around issues like innovation, inclusion and outreach.

The Encore Accelerando aims to identify promising project ideas in the field of classical music and fast track their development by offering them training and coaching, in this edition with the inspiring sessions of Ricardo Van Mildert, Wojtek Hazanowicz and Barna Petrányi, as well as a platform to pitch their ideas to a professional jury. The enCORE jury had the task of selecting the best three projects, each of whom received a microgrant of €1000 towards kick-starting their dreams.

The awarded projects were Cōnsentiō [agree, accord, harmonize] by Kristine Botros (Sweden), The Creative Baggage Collective by Serena Huang and Justin Bartlett (USA) and For Who Was Not Born by Dominika Ács, María Valverde and Veronika T-Potzner (Hungary). You can access the recordings of their final pitches here. For all the enCORE action and jury commentary you can find the livestream recorded here.

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Encore website: www.encoreclassical.org

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Alternatively, if you have any queries, you can email the Encore team at: mail@jmi.net

Meet the 2022 Winners

Cōnsentiō [agree, accord, harmonize] → watch the pitch

By Kristine Botros (Sweden)

Our project is a unique collaboration between an academic music producer and highly awarded, internationally renowned classical pianist. Together we are making music that combines two distinct musical genres and pushes boundaries, in order to forge classical music together with electronic/pop-music. Audience that is consuming this subgenre is growing fast in Europe, where both classical and pop-music scenes easily co-exist, this makes modern neoclassical music gaining popularity as never before. This is why we are making high quality music to take the audience of this new and growing subgenre by storm.

The Creative Baggage Collective → watch the pitch

By Serena Huang and Justin Bartlett (USA)

After releasing over 60 podcast conversations with young and established professionals in our field, our biggest takeaway is this: we’ve been taught that the path to a “successful” career in classical music is straight and narrow, when in reality the path to a fulfilling career in classical music is vast, winding, and full of surprises. In order to address this discrepancy, we want to develop an accessible launching point for musicians who feel stuck or don’t know where to start. The Creative Baggage Collective will be an interdisciplinary space for lost creatives to find and share resources, opportunities, and mutual support.

For Who Was Not Born → watch the pitch

By Dominika Ács, María Valverde and Veronika T-Potzner (Hungary)

Our project is a performance about the mystery of female creativity, fertility, and the state of losing the intangible, what is not yet visible. It puts together classical repertoire, pop, jazz and folk songs, improvisation pieces and medleys. The musical performance includes elements of literature, visual arts, dance and theater. The goals of the project are to break prejudices about classical music, explore new ways of self expression, make classical music relevant in the society, but also to represent voiceless people and explore social taboos and polemical topics.