Young musicians compete for overseas scholarships

The 2013 competition focuses on pianists and keyboard players, and the SAMRO Foundation has announced the six semi-finalists in the Western Art Music and Jazz/Popular Music categories, who will vie for the scholarships.

In the Jazz/Popular Music category, the semi-finalists are: Lifa Arosi, Bokani Dyer, Sibusiso Mashiloane, Wandile Molefe, Gabriel Montgomery, and Nicholas Williams.

The Western Art (classical) Music candidates are: Coila-Leah Enderstein, Jan Hugo, Sylvia Jen, Nina Phillips, Megan-Geoffrey Prins, and Daniel Strahilevitz.

They will all take part in the intermediate round of the competition at the SABC's M1 Studio in Auckland Park on Thursday, 29 August, 2013, when they will be put through their musical paces by a panel of accomplished adjudicators. Two finalists in each genre will then be selected to go through to the final round, to be held at the same venue on Saturday, 31 August, 2013.

A ringing endorsement

The duel between the two classical and two jazz pianists is always highly charged and superbly entertaining, and serves as a ringing endorsement of the standard of musical talent coming out of the country's university music programmes.

What is particularly gratifying, according to André le Roux, executive GM of the SAMRO Foundation, is that through its various music study awards SAMRO is helping to build a tight-knit artistic family who are influential in the music world.

He explained that one of the semi-finalists, Gabriel Montgomery, has previously been the recipient of music study bursaries from SAMRO - and is now trying his luck at reeling in the big fish, the Overseas Scholarship. Two candidates - Bokani Dyer and Sibusiso Mashiloane -entered the competition four years ago and made it to the finals, and have now set their sights on bagging the main prize the second time around. Another example of how SAMRO is continually ploughing back into the South African music family is that two previous scholarship winners are now serving on the judging panel.

"It shows that SAMRO, as a patron, is not just supporting one-off events, but reinvesting in growing our cultural wealth and our community of musicians over time, the culmination of which is the scholarships competition, and being involved in their career trajectories thereafter."

For more information, go to www.samrofoundation.org.za or contact Naseema Yusuf at the SAMRO Foundation on +27 (0)11 712 8417 or az.gro.ormas@fusuy.ameesan.