A glimpse from inside the world of music competitions

We all know what music competitions look like from the outside: the glamour and tension of the final rounds, the ecstasy of the laureates and the agony of young musicians who walk away with nothing. And then sometimes – just sometimes – the feeling that we’ve witnessed a star being born. But we don’t often get to see competitions from the inside, so it’s been enlightening to join the World Federation of International Music Competitions for their conference in Parma last week.

If you try asking a competition director the obvious question “what is your competition’s main purpose?”, you’ll get (if they’re being candid) a surprising variety of answers. It could be to celebrate the memory of some great composer or artist of yesteryear. Or it might all be for the glamour and spectacle of the finals: this is show business, after all. But the majority of competitions start out with a determination to identify the artists of tomorrow and to further their careers. This can get quite extreme: one competition director seemed to have little interest in the concept of winning or losing, being far more exercised by the whole process of taking part in the event – and how that experience can shape the candidates forever.

Of course, competitions are nothing without entrants, and ideas abound on how to attract them. Do you publish your call for applications years in advance, or give candidates just a few months? Do you ask for video, as most do these days, or do you send your pre-selection jury on travels around the globe? Or both?

One advantage in asking for video is that it improves inclusivity. Competitions get hundreds (sometimes many hundreds) of applicants from all over the world – and video brings with it the possibility of anonymisation, making jurors choose on the basis of the performance alone, without being biased by candidates’ CVs. But there’s a problem: jury fatigue. For even the most hardened juror, locking yourself up in a room watching dozens of videos of young artists is a daunting, exhausting experience. Ten videos in, how to keep yourself focused and be sure that you are being fair? Particularly if the entry rules have allowed freedom of repertoire, so the submissions are of dramatically different music – comparing apples with oranges doesn’t even begin to describe it.

By the way, the requirement for video only aggravates a syndrome that all competition organisers bemoan: the bunching of all entries until the deadline. One organiser described having literally zero entries on the day before entries closed, with 70 arriving on the day, most of them in the last hour. The suggestion was made that upsetting as this may be to organisers, it's only natural for candidates to go up to the wire to refine their application to the very best they can: what’s often happening is that applicants are booking studio time as best they can and doing retake after retake in the hope of getting the best possible performance to submit.

Of course, the alternative isn’t necessarily all that great. It’s perfectly possible to get exhausted sitting in a room for several hours, listening live to a series of musicians. For those competitions which attract international stars as members of their pre-selection jury, the chances are the juror will be sitting for many hours in a nightmarish state of jet lag. Yes, these people are used to jet lag – but even so, it can’t be an appealing prospect.

So how, one might ask, should competitions choose the repertoire to ask for, both for pre-selection and for the different rounds? If the competition bears the name of a composer, it’s easy enough: in the Liszt Competition, it’s going to be hard to escape the Sonata in B minor, while you know whose symphonies candidates will be conducting in the Mahler Competition. But most organisers have a pretty free rein as to what they can ask for. Since, by now, most entrants have staggeringly high technical levels, you’re trying to flush out some special gift for communicating the soul of the music, and there are many ways of doing this. If you ask for one of the standards of the repertoire, a piece with hundreds of recordings, you find out who can bring a genuinely fresh approach to an overplayed piece (or, conversely, be today’s incarnation of past greatness). If you can afford to commission a new work for your competition, you can see how your candidates cope when they build their interpretation from a blank sheet of paper, with no assistance from past masters. And of course, if you give candidates a carte blanche, they can be sure to display their talents to the absolute best effect, at least in their own view.

By the way, how did you find those candidates in the first place? Competition promoters are required to engage in a dizzying mix of social media platforms, advertising outlets (I declare an interest here, since Bachtrack is one of those), mailing list upkeep, wooing of music teachers, flyers on conservatoire walls and whatever else they can think of. There is room for debate on fairness: should you encourage winners of other competitions to apply (improves quality) or forbid it (gives more people a chance)? Should there be an age limit (and if so, what? 35 is pretty typical, a figure which seems to have been rising in recent years). And – perhaps most contentiously of all – should you engage in affirmative action? Some consider a women-only competition like La Maestra to be a bold step in the advancement of women; others (including some women), think it’s an aberration.

Eventually, nearing exhaustion, the organisers arrive at the big event: finals day and the ensuing awards ceremony. Here, the pitfalls are legion, as demonstrated at the Queen Elisabeth Competition last week where the Ukrainian winner pointedly refused to shake hands with Russian jury member Vadim Repin. Several of the WFIMC attendees declared themselves opposed to the whole concept of a “wedding line-up” in the first place, and they weren’t short of other war stories.

The Queen Elisabeth story begs the question of why someone prominently honoured by Putin was on the jury in the first place, however distinguished a violinist. And indeed, although this wasn't a focus of the conference, jury selection is a thorny problem. Not the least of the difficulties is that most of the best qualified jurors are engaged in teaching, which raises inevitable problems of conflict of interest in which a juror might favour their own students.

In some finals, it’s happened that everyone gets a prize of some sort except one, who is left to trudge sadly off-stage. On a bad day, the wrong finalist’s name is announced as a prizewinner, prompting a hastily scrambled retraction. Acceptance speeches of the “thank you to my parents, to my teachers” variety are bad enough at the Oscars, but even more embarrassingly trite in the mouths of people who have spent their young lives practising an instrument and not in training for public speaking. And when sponsors are allowed to make speeches, they can drone on interminably, bringing the event to a close in the small hours.

For the competitions whose main purpose is celebration or spectacle, that’s where it ends, until the next edition. But for the best ones – those who really care about their laureates – the work continues. The months or years until the next edition are spent energetically promoting the lucky winners, with recording contracts, help in finding an artist manager, mentoring, performance opportunities. Perhaps the biggest thrill a competition director (or sponsor) can get is to see a young artist reach the stars, in the knowledge that they have played their part in really turning on the afterburners for that career.