Read more news stories here<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nThe first round of the 2026 Queen Elisabeth Competition took place from 4 to 9 May 2026 at Flagey, Brussels, Belgium. 64 cellists performed a recital programme comprising a sonata by Boccherini, a work with piano accompaniment, plus\u00a0Lullaby\u00a0for solo cello by\u00a0Kaija Saariaho.<\/p>\n
24 cellists have been selected to take part in the semi-final rounds, which will take place from 11 to 16 May. Each contestant will perform twice, once in the evening and once in the afternoon on a different day.<\/p>\n
Semi-finalists will play a concerto from\u00a0Concerto in C major op. 4 by Anton Kraft, Concerto in B flat major by Michael Haydn and Concerto in D major Badley D3 by Leopold Hofmann, accompanied by the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie, conducted by Vahan Mardirossian.<\/p>\n
They will also perform a recital.\u00a0The jury will choose one of two recital programmes proposed by the candidate, each including works of the candidate\u2019s choice and the compulsory unpublished work written especially for this year\u2019s edition by Harold Noben,\u00a0Caffeine.<\/p>\n
The 24 semi-finalists are:<\/p>\n
Andrew Ilhoon Byun<\/p>\n
Roric Cunningham<\/p>\n
Clara Dietlin<\/p>\n
L\u00e9o Ispir<\/p>\n
Tae-Yeon Kim<\/p>\n
Yo Kitamura<\/p>\n
Leland Ko<\/p>\n
Theresa Laun<\/p>\n
Isaac Lottman<\/p>\n
\u00c1lvaro Lozano Cames<\/p>\n
Lionel Martin<\/p>\n
Anna Meipariani<\/p>\n
Krzysztof Michalski<\/p>\n
Marcus Michelin<\/p>\n
Dilshod Narzillaev<\/p>\n
Ettore Pagano<\/p>\n
Ivan Sendetsky<\/p>\n
Michael Song<\/p>\n
Simon Tetzlaff<\/p>\n
Michael Wehrmeyer<\/p>\n
Alexander Wollheim<\/p>\n
Jiaxun Yao<\/p>\n
Maria Zaitseva<\/p>\n
Arne Jesper Zeller<\/p>\n
The jury for the first round comprised Gilles Ledure (chairman), Natalie Clein, Roel Dieltiens, Valentin Erben, Oph\u00e9lie Gaillard, Anne Gastinel, Benjamin Glorieux, Marie Hallynck, Anssi Karttunen, Daniel M\u00fcller-Schott, Sharon Robinson and Jian Wang.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Read more news stories here\u00a0 The first round of the 2026 Queen Elisabeth Competition took place from 4…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-226799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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