Karol Szymanowski International Music Competition is an opportunity for outstanding young artists. An opportunity to broaden the scope and increase the momentum of their career. An opportunity to get international recognition and to win a great prize.

The competition takes place every five years in four performing disciplines: piano, violin, string quartet and voice. The fifth, special category is the composing competition, taking place a year ahead of the performing competition.

From place to place and from style to style Karol Szymanowski was a straussian romantic, an expressive impressionist and a folklorist – each of them at a different moment.

That did not, however necessitate searching for a language – as for a language, he had always been a master of his own one, enabling him to say exactly what he wanted to say. The journey was more one of constant search for inspirations and challenges, ways of reaching perfection suitable at a given moment.

The Karol Szymanowski International Music Competition could not have originated in any other place. It is in Katowice that the intertwinement of certain unique elements lets the city, once mainly associated with coal mining, become widely recognised as an inexhaustible mine of talent today.

Interestingly, although Karol Szymanowski only visited Katowice once, almost the whole of the city’s musical infrastructure today is irrevocably related to him.