This year, the jury at the international competition for compositions for youth string quartets, established by the Piero Farulli Association, convened on September 30 in Milano to announce the winners of the competition’s third edition.

By unanimous vote, awards were given for the following compositions:  

-Section A (compositions with low-medium degree of difficulty): Elements – Little String Quartet by Luis Laya (Venezuela).
-Section B (compositions with preprofessional degree of difficulty): Collision by Leonids Lobrevs (Latvia).


The scores for both compositions will be published by Ricordi in the Piero Farulli for String Quartets educational series. The winning composers each received a cash prize of €2,000 from the Alimondo Ciampi Foundation.

Both compositions will be presented by musicians from the Regional Orchestra of Tuscany, in world premiere performances at the Strings City Festival in Florence.
 
The jury, composed of Giacomo Manzoni, Adriano Guarnieri, Joerg Widmann, Chia-Ying Lin and Daniel Herrera, was impressed by the decidedly high musical and instrumental quality of nearly all the compositions that competed this year, especially in Section B. In all, 151 composers took part in the competition: 36 in Section A and 115 in Section B. The composers hailed from Asia, North and South America, Oceania and Europe.