Day 6

Free day today for most of us, not for the semi-finalists nor for the office assistants...

It's been fun reading some of the comments. They're mostly naive, aggressive, or ignorant. Somebody even claimed that the president of the jury doesn't vote, in both languages, luckily Risto-Matti corrected her/him (thank you for that!).

Time is the only factor in this branch. It doesn't matter what you win, or how much you win. If you can't be good for a long time -and I mean years and decades, not just days- then you're not good enough...

After this short intro, I'd like to apologize for my -somewhat- absolute style when I write. I guess, it's my way to show that I've been thinking some of the things I'm commenting on for years, not just for the 10 minutes it takes to write them, and definitely not because of this competition -nor my failure in it... And I've been as well discussing about problems with colleagues from all over the world...

In this spirit, I have to add something to a comment I did earlier -on good sense, click on it on the right side of the page- concerning the last competition's jury. There were some weak performances in the finals five years ago, true. Time however, proved the jury correct, at least for prizes 1, 2, and 4; that is of course, until now.

Concerning the present edition of Maj Lind some facts: 10 women out 14 finalists; 3 out of the 4 men are Finns; only a handful with Beethoven sonata passed to the 2nd round; it seems also that better known contemporary pieces [or pieces from better known composers] favoured a bit some contestants (that's no fact I know, it just seems like that!). I'm not bothered from the high number of Finnish participants: initially, there were 11 Finnish accepted applicants, and 40 foreigners. 10 of them cancelled during the last month. So, the Finnish percentage raised from 20% to 25%, now it's around 43%, and I won't be surprised if it raises more to 50% in the finals.

But that's me, I've been living here for quite a while, I know most of the pianists personally, I studied with some of them. One has to give serious thinking on the following: 6 out 14 doesn't look nice to someone following the competition from thousand of miles away, through the internet for example.

Nice comment by Simon, all is wonderful and perfect at the beginning!

Semi-final starts tomorrow, I think I'll do some listening.

Break a leg!

Cheers!

Wednesday May 30th