
The cream this year comprises 32 young violinists from
Bulgaria, China, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland,
Ukraine, the UK and the USA, each of which is hoping to secure the first prize
of US$50,000, a loan of a 1680 Stradivarius and a number of performance
engagements.
I would hope, however, that their real ambition is to
win the Audience Prize; their future musical careers will depend on audiences
liking the way they play, and if they have that magic touch which gets the
audience on their side, that is worth far more than any financial award. As an occasional adjudicator myself (I will
be adjudicating at no less than three competitions during the course of this
year) I know how intimidating an Audience Prize can be; you desperately hope
that your choice matches that of the audience, but it rarely does. What adjudicators see in a performance is
rarely the same as what audiences see.
Sitting in on the First Round performances, I was very
conscious that many in the audience were taking their role seriously, and while
during the performance I saw copious notes being taken and assessments made, I
overheard some intense discussions between sessions over the relative merits of
the players. Whatever result the panel
of adjudicators comes up with, it can hardly have been more assiduously contemplated
than the audience’s ultimate decision.
Looking around the audience, however, I was conscious
of something interesting.
Singapore is fairly small place, and as a very
frequent concert-goer here, I get to recognise the habitués of a local
audience. At the competition, the
handful of people, like me, who go to just about everything was there, but the
vast bulk of the audience was made up of people who I never see at public
concerts. They were listening in rapt
attention and were eloquent in their reserved and undemonstrative applause to
most of the performers. It struck me
then that music competitions (and it is phenomenon by no means unique to
Singapore) inhabit a kind of parallel universe; a performance sub-genre which
seems to be moving further and further away from its parent, the public concert. It attracts a very different audience, who
are there to witness top class playing regardless of player or repertory, and
very confident in their own minds about what constitutes a winning performance.
This idea is reinforced by those who are performing in
the competition. In the booklet with the
competition, each of the players had provided a biography. I found it slightly unnerving to read through
these and realise that, for some of them, it seems as if their entire musical world
revolves around competitions.
Biographies listing innumerable first, second and third places in competitions
held in remote places, along with the names of strings of teachers (why do so
many of today’s aspiring professionals seem to change their teacher every few
weeks or so?) gave a vivid impression of a life bounded by preparing for and
participating in competitions.
(Never let it be said that I am cynical, but I wonder
whether the profusion of biographies which mention teachers and competitions
are encouraged by teachers themselves - if you can show that your pupils
consistently do well in competitions, how valuable is that as a marketing ploy
when trying to attract new students – but that’s an unworthy comment.)
As a young player I took part in plenty of competitions
myself. Invariably I came out second or
third; the same people turned up at each competition, and one fellow always
came first, while I along with another seemed to take it in turns to come
second and third. I can hardly think that,
had I been asked to write a biographical note then, I would have bothered to
mention this; it seemed such an obvious occurrence that it barely warranted
comment. Much more interesting for me
were the performances I gave, often, it must be said, drawing on the repertory I
had been obliged to learn for the latest competition (and that’s another reason
why I like competitions – players are rarely allowed to wheel out their particular
party-pieces, and need to learn something special for the event).
Yet there were biographies in the programme here which
never mentioned a public performance at all.
If these players had performed to a live audience in a non-competitive environment,
they seemed to regard it as of peripheral interest.
Significantly, the page which recounted the
achievements of the laureates from the previous Singapore International Violin
Competition informed us that of the six listed, most had gone on to participate
in further competitions, some had won prizes and scholarships, but just one
confessed to having made an “appearance with the Philadelphia orchestra”. Is the result of winning a competition the opportunity
to participate in another? Competitions
seem to have become self-sustaining, with no need for young musicians to move
away from the competitive environment and put their playing out into the public
arena.
We might suggest that this is the standard practice in
competitions, and we should not question it.
Yet biographies in programmes exert a subtle but undeniable influence over
audience perceptions. We know from research,
that most members of an audience (competition or concert) read the biographies
first (and often read nothing else in the programme books) and that these
biographies affect their perceptions of an artist’s ability. I am very well aware of this, yet even so, I
cannot help myself when I read a biography which suggests the performer only participates
in competitions beside one which talks of major performances in iconic venues
with leading musical partners and orchestra, of falling into the subconscious
expectation that the latter performer will be better than the former. I assume the latter will have mastered the
art of satisfying and appealing to an audience; the former will still be
obsessed with the kind of technical minutiae which impresses adjudicators but
passes over the heads of most audience members, and I have to battle against
this prejudice in order to assess fairly the performances I hear.
It would be good to think that performers and
audiences alike see competitions, not as an activity detached from public performance
but as one supporting it.