Who do competitions serve?

Béatrice Reibel’s Chopin could have been straight off a record. It sounded incredibly good, but definitely far too controlled. All I can personally recall of her performance is that yes she can play the cello. Her tone production, intonation and all the other technical things are, of course, beyond reproach. And I don’t even need to mention this, because anyone can hear it. If only I could say just what her performance lacked. There was something missing. To my mind. But as I said, she sounded incredibly good.

Georgiy Lomakov’s Beethoven left me cold (again). Op. 102/1 is extremely revealing in many ways and to my mind it would be better not to choose Beethoven unless you really have something to say. Nor, unfortunately, was his Chopin op. 3 anything like as good as yesterday’s performance of it by Aurelien Sabouret. His uncertainty was reflected in the intonation, tone production and vibrato.

Nicolas Altstaedt gave an unbelievably fine performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s op. 102/1! He has quite definitely internalised an extremely fine approach to the music of Beethoven. In this performance we could at last speak of a proper Sturm und Drang. The Dutilleux also sounded magnificent! One of the best in the first round.

Nicolas Altstaedt

The first round is now over and the jury has spoken. The third-day player who sticks most firmly in my mind is definitely the last to perform, i.e. Altstaedt. Reading through my comments I notice that I did not altogether agree with the jury over lots of the players. I’m terribly disappointed that the second-day evening players, especially Sabouret and Yoo, are out. It’s not quite the correct thing to say whose places I would have given to them, but you can no doubt read that between the lines of my comments. Nothing for it, I suppose, but to say that many people feel music competitions are terribly unfair and corrupt. So why are they held? I don’t know, because unfortunately they seldom serve the performing musician. There was a telling comment on the Finnish website: “Second-round surprises?” It didn’t come as any surprise to me at least that eight of the cellists in the semi-finals have their own teacher (past or present) on the jury!!! It’s a widely-known fact, though one hushed up in the media, that members of juries are wise to vote for other members’ pupils if they want to get an invite to the next tournament. The “old boy” system works. Could we have some public debate about this? It would, to my mind, be a good opportunity to hear a few opinions on the subject so that something could be done about it.

Back now to my day job, but I’ll be writing about the finals in due course.