Turning a globe to a spot roughly equidistant between London and Beijing, with Moscow due north, one lands upon the United Arab Emirates, where the third edition of the Classic Piano International Competition has just been held. Its position makes it an ideal location to welcome musicians from around the whole world. A British protectorate until 1971, since independence the UAE’s seven emirates have invested heavily in education and development. The country’s largest city Dubai has become a popular tourist resort on the shores of the Persian Gulf, with a diversity of architectural aesthetics emerging from what was a desert only forty years ago. Dubai has recently attempted to conquer the sky by erecting the world’s tallest skyscraper (830 metres), and even ventured into the sea, by building a palm-shaped peninsula of reclaimed land.
It was in the Zabeel Theatre, built on this giant offshore palm frond, that Classic Piano 2024 decided to hold its contest rounds. (The first edition of the competition was held not in Dubai, but in Malta.) But if you think the contest has been parachuted into a place with no connection whatsoever with music, think again: the Competition’s discreet artistic director organised a carefully curated festival to run alongside the rounds themselves. From 1st to 15th February, the Berlin Symphony and Oxford Philharmonic Orchestras made appearances, along with many soloists, including violinists James Ehnes and Maxim Vengerov, pianists Fazıl Say, Cyprien Katsaris and Ashley Wass, among others.
The latter was also a member of the competition’s jury – comprising a mix of pianists, conductors, agents and concert promoters. In addition to Wass, the roster of pianists on the jury included no lesser names than Peter Donohoe, Pavel Gililov, François-Frédéric Guy, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Hüseyin Sermet. Some teach privately or in institutional settings, but all of them have real careers as concert musicians.
The jury also included two people, Kirsten Dawes and Eleanor Hope, able to offer the competition’s laureates a plethora of performance opportunities, the former working in Berlin at the Pierre Boulez Saal, the latter in Vienna where she runs a management agency. This side of things is worthy of mention: in a world where competitions can often blur together, the depth of this competition’s jury is a notable exception. A good competition starts with a good jury. And a good jury rewards talent that is ready for a career – not merely the ability acquired by the end of a student’s training. The distinction between these two conditions is not always easy to detect.
70 candidates had made their way through the preliminary tests organised over a period of two years in several major cities in Europe, America and Asia. Of these, 43 candidates arrived in Dubai for the first round of the competition proper. The youngest was 14, while the oldest was on the eve of his 37th birthday (of a sufficient age to be the youngest’s father). They came from all over the world: China, South Korea, Japan, Georgia, New Zealand, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Ukraine, Turkey, Belarus, Italy, Israel, the United States, Armenia, and Russia, with some Russians adding the name of their country of residence to that of their country of origin. (This arduous process is soon to begin again for the Classic Violin Olympus Competition, to be held in 2025.)
The final two rounds were filmed and broadcast live on the internet by medici.tv, which is heavily involved in the broadcasting of music competitions. Such events are now held under the scrutiny of a worldwide audience which is distant but no less passionate. The atmosphere in the hall itself was somewhat strange: while the theatre was open to the public, few people decided to show up. Most of the performances were held in front of the jury and the fifteen or so journalists who had also come from all over the world. This can be seen as a flaw: there was no general audience there to support the candidates as they would be normally supported at a concert. But it can also be considered an advantage: there was no audience to lend proceedings an air of hysteria, loudly expressing their favoured choices (as can happen in some other long-established international competitions).