The 2020 George Enescu International Competition launched today, August 19, on the great composer’s birth anniversary, the #SaveBeautyInLife Challenge, which invites the society to respond and act in the face of fear, adversity, and uncertainty generated by the pandemic, cherishing life and the beauty that brings joy and meaning to each one of us.
Launched in the context of the 2020’s edition of the Enescu Competition, the Save Beauty in Life Challenge is an awareness campaign, meant to bring a breath of fresh air to the social mood and inspire people to brave the pandemic, standing up to it by protecting what matters most for each individual: health, love, harmony, emotion, beauty.
Oana Marinescu, Communications Director of the George Enescu International Festival and Competition declared:
“The Enescu Competition aims to send several caring messages to Romanians, inspiring them to find the strength to reinvent themselves, despite the immense fragility with which the pandemic has brutally confronted them:
- The pandemic is a transitional period. It is important to look beyond it, to the way we will emerge, as human beings, when things settle down. We have what it takes to go through the pandemic – it’s within us, in the things that matter and which we fear we have already lost or we are losing now. We can reinvent ourselves if, instead of fear, we reconnect to their beauty and fight to carry them on into our post-pandemic lives. And this can be done simply by putting what matters most in our lives first.
- We are together in this brutal confrontation and only together we can overcome it. Although fear and fragility divide us, we are all people and we need each other. Our humanity binds us. We need to connect to it. Both our lives and the lives of others depend on each one of us. When we wear a mask or not, when we respect or disregard the personal hygiene rules, when we keep the social distancing or not – we choose life, or not, for ourselves and others. When we support each other, when we share the beauty in our lives, when we treat each other with respect and compassion, when we work as a team, we embraced life and make room for beauty.
- Arts and culture, regardless of the field, are vital to saving the beauty in our lives and, implicitly, humanity. The pandemic has deeply affected them all over the world, including in Romania. For artists to continue to create, they need support from both the public and the authorities. The arts nurture the profound expression of our humanity. And the pandemic is affecting precisely our humanity.
- The Enescu Competition refused to cancel its 2020’s edition, although the evolution of the pandemic pushed hard towards it. The Competition was reorganized online, in two phases, to continue to bring music into the lives of its audience and to help young competitors continue their careers, no matter how difficult it may be. The Enescu Competition embraced life, protecting the public and the artists, as well as the beauty of music. And now, it states clearly not only that the music must go on even if in the online format, but also that it depends on each of us whether the Semifinals and Finals of the 2021 Competition and the Enescu Festival 2021 will be held with audiences in the concert halls.”
The challenge launched publicly today is expressed in a Manifesto of Personal and Social Responsibility – It Is up To Us To Choose What We Lose and What We Save During the Pandemic, which was also released today. At the end of the Manifesto, the Enescu Competition invites artists, opinion leaders, persons of culture, music lovers, and life lovers to respond to the challenge and to share openly what is the beauty in their lives that they would like to hold on to in their post-pandemic life. The Manifesto can be found at this link. The Enescu Competition invites all those who take up this challenge, to share on social networks or their owned channels what Beauty in Life means to them. Together we can suffuse the public space with the energy that only beauty in life can bestow.
The firsts to respond to this Challenge are the artists and persons of culture who participated today in an online Conversation About Beauty, organized by the Enescu Competition: actress Ana Ularu, actress Maia Morgenstern, poet and playwright Matei Vişniec, composer Dan Dediu, artist Mircea Cantor, film producer Ada Solomon, soprano Bianca Ionescu, violinist Alexandru Tomescu, actress Medeea Marinescu, conductor Tiberiu Soare, pianist Mihai Ritivoiu, dancer and choreographer Gigi Căciuleanu, film critic Irina Margareta Nistor, actor Marius Manole, cultural journalist Marius Constantinescu, promoter of culture and the founder of ARCEN, Edmond Niculușcă, and the Executive Director of the George Enescu International Festival, Mihai Constantinescu.
Also within the campaign, the 2020 George Enescu Competition launched today its campaign video clip, which you can watch at this link. The video spot is narrated by actress Ana Ularu, who was invited by the Enescu Competition to support and promote the #SaveBeautyInLife Challenge, as a symbol of the importance of collaboration between arts, of constantly evolving talent and artistic curiosity.
Additional Information about the 2020 George Enescu Competition
The 2020 George Enescu International Competition, scheduled to take place between August 29 and September 20, goes ahead, albeit in a new format with two distinct phases. The first two Rounds of the Competition will be held online in September according to the initial calendar, whereas the Semifinals and Finals of all sections are rescheduled for May 2021, at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest. The general public will have access to the Opening Gala and the first two Rounds exclusively online and free.
George Enescu International Competition is an international platform for launching the future world-class musicians and for promoting the compositions of the great Romanian composer to the new generation of artists. It is thus a natural extension of the George Enescu Festival, the most important cultural event organized in Romania. The Competition has four sections – violin, cello, piano, and composition – and it ranks in the top five classical music competitions worldwide.
