Hmm. 5 weeks after my lecture recital and still not received payment from the concert hall. Many aspects of the management at Forum Auditorium were not the standards you might expect at a professional concert hall. If you are looking for somewhere with a good piano and good acoustic to give a recital in Taipei I sadly recommend you find somewhere else (until there is some change of management).
Wednesday 27 November 2013
Monday 4 November 2013
Piano Competitions and the Wizard of Oz
I don't know if you have watched the classic movie the Wizard of Oz? When Dorothy finally arrives at Emerald City and peeps behind the curtain, she realises that the mighty Oz was an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. I have been wondering the same about piano competitions recently. So much huff and puff, and... are the rewards actually worth it for the performer? I decided to conduct an objective experiment to evaluate - are the winners of piano competitions actually getting the solo recitals that their efforts deserve? Here is how I conducted my experiment.
1) I checked out the results of the two most famous competitions: Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, and the Leeds Piano Competition, UK. A full table of winners is here: Leeds competition winners. I decided to randomly select 5 prize winners from the past and check how many recitals they have advertised on their websites in the coming 6 months.
2) Using the wikipedia table, I assigned a number to each prize-winner as follows: top line, Federico C. is number 1 [1-6 reading L to R]; 2nd line, Sofya G. is number 7, [7-12 reading L to R]etc.
3) Then I visited a 'random number generator website, 'random number generator website, and selected five numbers between 1 and 42. (In my case it gave me 15, 1, 9, 41, 38). So this gave me the names of five Leeds prize-winners between 1993 and 2012.
4) Then I looked online for the websites of these performers, or their agents, and found their concert schedule / concert diary / upcoming engagements etc.
5) Grand total. The number of solo recitals in the next 18 months for the five prize-winning pianists, all added together into one big total, was ... drumroll... 25. So an average of five 5 recitals per prize-winner over the next 6 months. Some of these recitals were in pretty small venues such as the tiny Scottish town of Nairn (8,401 population). [Nairn Community and Arts Centre (15 November 2013), Holy Trinity Church, Nairn, 16 November etc, for Alessandro T., performer number 9].
Now I am absolutely sure that these competition winners play better than me, and that the concert-going public of small towns are great listeners, I have no doubt about it. But the question remains: does the evidence suggest that competition winners are genuinely launched into productive careers on the solo platform, or not?
If you want to check other competition results, I challenge you to find out how many upcoming recitals you can find by Ayako Uehara, 1st prize winner of the Tchaikovsky piano competition.
Is their effort worth it? Perhaps not. You probably know how hard it is to win a major international piano competition, right? Think becoming a brain surgeon, winning Miss World / Mr Universe, and learning to write Arabic.
The point is, perhaps the concert-going public is no longer buying the whole piano competition thing. Consciously or unconsciously, have we reached a tipping-point where people realise that a gladiatorial system is not best suited to expressive artistry? Perhaps the public is over-saturated with pianists performing very similar repertoire (Gaspard de la Nuit, Liszt Sonata, etc), so that it may have become a disadvantage to be a competition winner.
What the public IS buying is pianists who have NOT won competitions. Paris and Tokyo and New York are buying Yuja Wang, Arkadi Volodos, Yvgeny Kissin, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Daniel Barenboim, Valentina Lisitsa, etc etc
But, I hear you cry, what about great performers who have won competitions? Like Radu Lupu and Daniil Trifonov. Well, I suspect that, like Yuja Wang and Volodos, they would have come to the attention of concert agents, the public, and record companies, with or without competitions.
I admit any counting method is open to debate: pianists may have failed to update their website; or you need to search in the home language of the performer (eg in Japanese for a Japanese winner). Having said that, if you look up Yuja Wang's upcoming schedule, it is pretty clear, even if you don't search in Chinese script.
But I am not asking you to accept my figures - be brave, take a peek behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz, see what is (or is not) behind the curtain!
2) Using the wikipedia table, I assigned a number to each prize-winner as follows: top line, Federico C. is number 1 [1-6 reading L to R]; 2nd line, Sofya G. is number 7, [7-12 reading L to R]etc.
3) Then I visited a 'random number generator website, 'random number generator website, and selected five numbers between 1 and 42. (In my case it gave me 15, 1, 9, 41, 38). So this gave me the names of five Leeds prize-winners between 1993 and 2012.
4) Then I looked online for the websites of these performers, or their agents, and found their concert schedule / concert diary / upcoming engagements etc.
5) Grand total. The number of solo recitals in the next 18 months for the five prize-winning pianists, all added together into one big total, was ... drumroll... 25. So an average of five 5 recitals per prize-winner over the next 6 months. Some of these recitals were in pretty small venues such as the tiny Scottish town of Nairn (8,401 population). [Nairn Community and Arts Centre (15 November 2013), Holy Trinity Church, Nairn, 16 November etc, for Alessandro T., performer number 9].
Now I am absolutely sure that these competition winners play better than me, and that the concert-going public of small towns are great listeners, I have no doubt about it. But the question remains: does the evidence suggest that competition winners are genuinely launched into productive careers on the solo platform, or not?
If you want to check other competition results, I challenge you to find out how many upcoming recitals you can find by Ayako Uehara, 1st prize winner of the Tchaikovsky piano competition.
Is their effort worth it? Perhaps not. You probably know how hard it is to win a major international piano competition, right? Think becoming a brain surgeon, winning Miss World / Mr Universe, and learning to write Arabic.
The point is, perhaps the concert-going public is no longer buying the whole piano competition thing. Consciously or unconsciously, have we reached a tipping-point where people realise that a gladiatorial system is not best suited to expressive artistry? Perhaps the public is over-saturated with pianists performing very similar repertoire (Gaspard de la Nuit, Liszt Sonata, etc), so that it may have become a disadvantage to be a competition winner.
What the public IS buying is pianists who have NOT won competitions. Paris and Tokyo and New York are buying Yuja Wang, Arkadi Volodos, Yvgeny Kissin, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Daniel Barenboim, Valentina Lisitsa, etc etc
 | ||
| 1st prize winner, Vienna Piano Competition, playing Gaspard de la Nuit with his left hand alone |
I admit any counting method is open to debate: pianists may have failed to update their website; or you need to search in the home language of the performer (eg in Japanese for a Japanese winner). Having said that, if you look up Yuja Wang's upcoming schedule, it is pretty clear, even if you don't search in Chinese script.
But I am not asking you to accept my figures - be brave, take a peek behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz, see what is (or is not) behind the curtain!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)