Odesa International Violin Competition to Return in New Location

The competition has been on hiatus since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but its 2025 edition will now be held from August 17–24 in Monheim, Germany

The World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC) and the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv have recently announced that the Odesa International Violin Competition (OIVC) will be reinstated in 2025 and that this year's edition will take place from August 17–24 in Monheim, Germany.

The final round will be accompanied by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, with Oksana Lyniv conducting. Since August 2024, the orchestra musicians have been living in Monheim am Rhein, where they bring Ukrainian culture closer to the public as employees of Monheimer Kulturwerke.

Founded in 2018 by the Ukrainian violinist Andrii Murza, the competition has been indefinitely postponed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It was originally founded in memory of Peter Stolyarsky, a violinist who opened the first specialized music school in the USSR for children (1933) and taught violinists such as David Oistrakh, Boris Goldstein, Nathan Milstein, Elizabeth Gilels, Mikhail Fichtenholz, and many others.

The winner of the most recent edition in 2021 was VC Artist Dmytro Udovychenko.

At the 2025 edition, the jury will comprise Marc Bouchkov, Andrii Murza, Soyoung Yoon, Aleksey Semenenko, Mario Hossen, Rūta Lipinaitytė, Zohrab Tadevosyan, Harald Schoneweg, and Christiane von Velsen.

"You need strong international partners, and we are lucky and grateful to Monheimer Kulturwerke and its Intendant Martin Witkowski, who has not only taken the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra into exile at his institution, but now has also shown a great interest into the Odesa Competition," Lyniv said. "For a competition, you need space — practice rooms, pianos, a hall for the final, and Monheim is the perfect place."

"An important point for the Odesa Competition is the Ukrainian repertoire. Ukrainian culture, and Ukrainian music, had long been neglected or even suppressed by the Russian Empire and later by the Soviet Union. Now, at a time when the whole world is looking at Ukraine, there is a great opportunity to make this music known to the world."