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

1st prize winner, Vienna Piano Competition, playing Gaspard de la Nuit with his left hand alone

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!

Today's top 3 pianists

Enthusiasts of Golden Age pianism are perhaps at a disadvantage when it comes to listening to modern day pianists - there has been such a large change of taste, parallelled by the large change in the world's culture and society over the past half century. But there are many many wonderful pianists out there, not all of them in the limelight. Here are three first class living pianists on the stage- may they live long and prosper!:

Grigory Sokolov
plays wonderful Baroque (among other wonderful things).

Radu Lupu
In recent recitals Mr Lupu looks every bit the reincarnation of Brahms.
Not much out therre in the way of interviews, but there is a good interview in "Great pianists and Pedagogues (interviews with Carola Grindea)" published by EPTA
If you click here you should get Schubert's Fantasia for two pianos, performed by Lupu with Murray Perahia

Nelson Freire plays Saint Saens concerto 2.
What wonderful flexibility, lightness, relaxation during a live performance! Hat's off!

Summary of disconnectnetdness

I would like to summarise the current state of dislocation between the Golden Age of pianism and our own 21st century pianism.
1) Golden Age pianists were pupils or grand-pupils (pupils of pupils) of Liszt and Chopin. This regal lineage rather died out around the second world war.
2) Golden Age pianists learnt to improvise and compose, and perform their compositions, in the lineage of their teachers. With very few exceptions this again died out by the second world war.
3) Golden age pianists often played with their arms extended, in the style visible on photographs of Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy and others (Radu Lupu these days does the same). Also with free arm weight. In modern pianism this is out of vogue, and elbows are often pinned to the side, leading to a degree of stiffness which is anathema to freedom.
4) For Golden Age pianists, the strength of spontaneous expression in the playing is paramount, so that the listener experiences a recreative force, perhaps equal in strength to the inspiration experienced by the composer at the moment of composition. Todays conservatoire teaches an altogether more controlled study and execution, the word execution meaning both realisation and death, as in the expression 'the operation was successful but the patient died'! If the listener does not come away from a piano recital having felt a powerful stream of inspiration, something has gone badly wrong.
5) The Golden Age pianist was frequently religious, looking on their pianism as a grave vocation, frequently compared to the priesthood or monasticism: Liszt was not the only pianist to take holy orders. Many moderns pianist have become more commercially motivated, as has the industry as a whole. The ultimate intentions of a performer affect the source to which one looks for inspiration, and consequently the nature of the outcome.
6) Many though not all Golden Age pianists explicitly preferred the sound of Bosendorfer pianos, which are in general rather lighter than the more assertive sound of the Steinway piano, which is now in use by the modern pianist in almost all major concert halls. With the Bosendorfer, sound was cloaked more delicacately, and the poetry of emotions was suggested rather than stated.
7) The Golden Age pianist often limited the amount of time spent practising, Chopin and Rosental recommending two hours a day, Hoffman recommending a generous 4 hours a day to his pupil Cherkassky. The modern pianist may often be practising 6-8 hours, which may make the ear less sensitive, and harden the natural suppleness of the arm. It may also result in boredom, as reported by Richter, (and occasionally some of his audience members!)
8) In consequence of 7), Golden Age pianists often made time to be polymaths, of wide ranging cultural learning (Moriz Rosental being a shining example). Many modern pianists are spending so long in repetitive practise and travel that they have no time for cultural research, resulting in a narrowness of context in their appreciation of the music, and if the performer does not fully appreciate the music, then the audience certainly will not.
In short, in order to go forwards, we now need to go backwards in time, with some urgency.