First Round

The competition was inaugurated in 2002, with Ian Partridge and James Bowman as the first adjudicators, and has grown to become a major international singing event, attracting 190 applicants from 32 countries all over the world in 2020. The composer George Frideric Handel was known to encourage and train young, unestablished singers, many of whom rose to fame as his star soloists. We continue Handel’s great tradition of nurturing talent through our International Handel Singing Competition, which is presented as part of the annual London Handel Festival