Okay, I am running out of competitions whose repertoire data I can access, or whose organizers are willing to hand it over… But after looking through the repertoire from TROMP and GPIMC, I wanted to continue exploring what marimbists are bringing to the competition stage. So I dove back into last year’s Marimba Festiva 2025, which took place in Germany, with preliminary rounds starting in 2024. The programs give us plenty of familiar performers and pieces, some interesting adaptations, and a few pieces that deserve more attention.
Something that interested me most about this collection is the relationship between established marimba repertoire and adaptations from other instruments. Keiko Abe, Akira Miyoshi, and Peter Klatzow appear alongside Bach, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Schoenberg, and Debussy.
The live competition took place from April 23 to 25, 2025, at Musikhaus Thomann in Treppendorf, near Bamberg. The repertoire sheet covers five age groups, with final-round programs for Groups I, II, and III, and semifinal and final programs for Groups IV and V.
The majority of this competition took place online, so sadly, we don’t have everyone’s full program listings.
In Group I, we see a lot of the repertoire you would expect from middle and high school students, with a few standouts. These include the Gigue from Bach’s Lute Suite, which I could not imagine playing before I was 15 years old, as well as Keiko Abe’s Wind Sketches, another great piece to tackle at such a young age.
In Group II, we get some more heavy-hitting repertoire, with Loops IV making an appearance alongside a Bach keyboard partita. We also get our first repeated work, with two performances of Luminosity.
In Group III, we get another big chunk of standard competition repertoire, with the first appearances of Moi, jeu…, Three Moves, Mirage, and Torse III, plus two performances of Dance of Earth and Fire. I was happy to see Dance of Earth and Fire making more competition appearances. I’ve always been a big fan of the work and have hoped to hear it more in the US.
In Group IV, we finally reach the young professionals. Here, we had mostly master’s students or early-career professionals. We had three semifinal performances of Velocities, two more performances of Dance of Earth and Fire in the finals, and the first appearance of Merlin! They also had a Castelnuovo-Tedesco set piece, which was great to listen to and get familiar with. Hopefully, this points toward a new trend of competitions exploring set pieces beyond Bach.
In Group V, the main thing to note was the first appearance of a work by Viñao, with Khan Variations played twice. We also got another performance of Merlin. Interestingly, only first and second prizes were awarded in this category, so I am curious why there was no third prize. Was the overall standard different from what the jury expected for this age group, or was there another reason?
Below, you will once again find my repertoire spreadsheet. I hope you enjoy exploring this competition’s diverse repertoire across so many different age groups!
