Featured image: Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition laureates Elli Choi, Dmytro Udovychenko and Joshua Brown (image credit: Belga/Nicolas Maeterlinck)
Judging by what we validate with our presence, there isn’t a more ignored quote among classical musicians than Bela Bartok’s “Competitions are for horses, not artists.”
It’s depressing to see not only how music competitions prosper today, but that they are often bigger business than many other musical offerings, commanding sold out audiences in addition to their litany of peripheral events and merchandising. Running a music competition is, somehow, a higher salaried job than being a performing musician (but then, so are the majority of jobs in the classical music industry held by non-musicians). Competitions can be big business for the musicians who vie for progressively larger and larger winner’s purses, but of course more so for the presenters, for whom competition rounds sell out far more easily than your average symphony orchestra concert. Because of this, more and more international competitions appear every year, and pre-existing ones become more bloated with every iteration.
In a manner similar to competitive athletes, many aspiring instrumentalists or chamber ensembles spend up to ten years of their life with competitions as one the main series of goals they work through and toward. Competition organisers, in keeping with the trend of for the most part the entire music industry, are forever content to find new ways to sell out, to subscribe entirely to pizzazz and wow-factor, and to make the focus progressively more and more lowest-common-denominator and less and less based on artistic nuance, integrity and originality. It’s telling and perhaps one of the greatest shark-jumps of all time that, even though his above quote is well known, someone decided to go ahead and create an international music competition named after Bartok anyway.
Unsurprisingly, the proliferation of competitions has also somewhat lowered their career impact for succesful participants. Whereas thirty years ago, winning one of either the Sibelius or Queen Elisabeth violin competitions would have been enough to guarantee a career, from circa 2000 onward this was no longer the case, or came with caveats. Sergey Khatchatrian, a violinist with a poetic, quiet personality, won the Sibelius competition as a teenager in 2000, had a year or two of concerts, and then presumably found it hadn’t had enough of an effect on his career, so entered the Queen Elisabeth in 2004 — a big risk as someone who had already won a “Grand Slam” — and managed to win it too. And even after winning these two of the most prestigious competitions that exist, he never found a huge, global fame, probably because he wasn’t enough of a salesman, in the manner that would become solidified and somewhat fossilised ten years later with the advent of someone like Ray Chen, for example, with his domineering internet and social media presence and practise room apps, or current sensation cellist Anastasia Kobekina, with her themed albums, vibrant photo shoots dripping with couture, seemingly daily YouTube and social media content, and a highly theatrical playing style.
Bearing in mind these relative successes and failures of recent winners to stay in the public eye, it’s fascinating to imagine how competition winners of the 80s and 90s who are now musical household names would have endured had they lived in our era — or perhaps more depressing than fascinating. One can’t imagine a competition winner and idealist like a young Gidon Kremer getting far as a young twentysomething in 2024, if he decided to point out for example that social media is utterly toxic and ultimately serves no purpose other than to perpetuate what is already essentially perpetual exposure for the sake of itself. The backlash he faced a few years ago for pulling out of a festival for its saturation of celebrity worship is telling. (Competitions aside, one wonders how undeniably genius, brilliant, but perhaps “difficult” artists like Carlos Kleiber, Glenn Gould, Maria Yudina or even Martha Argerich would have a career if they were starting out today, with their cancellations, moods, and highly strung personalities. But perhaps that’s a subject for a different article, and one that the bigwigs of the industry would discount regardless of its accuracy anyway).
At any rate, the most recent Queen Elisabeth violin competition was a line in the sand moment for this writer for two predominant reasons. Firstly, because the audience/viewer reactions, never exactly a font of human wisdom, were specially ignorant this year, and secondly due to the playing of the violinists itself, which was an intriguing, logical endgame which violin playing in general has perhaps been working towards for decades. To be clear, the quality of the playing was not technically or even musically poor anywhere — merely that the choice and variety of qualities were severely lacking.
Because here it is, this is the general approach of what we are meant to aspire to in solo violin playing in the year 2024 as was evident in this year’s Queen Elisabeth finalists and what various viewers and jurors reacted positively to: Everything, absolutely everything, is super espressivo, absolutely all the time, regardless of the what the music calls for, but only one kind of espressivo, a high intensity, constantly scowling, every bow change as hyper-connected as possible even when it’s completely unnecessary or indeed against the grain of the music, the latter while at the same time somehow not really having a through line or a sense of phrase. And of course, only one kind of vibrato per person, and which vibrato is also completely constant, somehow existing on staccato quavers and even semiquaver triplet notes. But most crucially for the consideration of the jury and the public, the interpretation has to be the same middle of the road, seen-it-1000-times, totally standard interpretation as the next person. In other words, every participant is doing this extreme, distended, indistinguishable-from-the-next-guy version of one middle-of-the-road, lowest-common-denominator interpretation of any given concerto. Like there’s only one interpretation allowed anymore, that the faceless majority of players, audiences and especially jurors are unable to even comprehend something if it isn’t that insidious grey vanilla, and even perhaps that it sounds like a mistake to them if it isn’t. And so now the focus point for the majority of musically uber-conservative punters and jurors is just how extremely you can execute the precious few stylistic and technical characteristics which are standardised, how loaded with espressivo you can make that note, how mega-intensely you can keep the legato through bow strokes. All of that, rather than the technical and stylistic aspects being free, and the interpretation being “extreme”, or, at the very least — perish the thought — original.
Because god help you if you’re different. Prior to the finals, one brilliant violinist Dmitri Smirnov dared* to play Mozart with improvised passagework, unorthodox, on-the-spot bowings, occasionally playing some sections (trigger warning) without vibrato, with great originality, and with a unique vibe and an effortless, sincere, unaffected style. It goes without saying that this sort of thing wouldn’t wash in a competition; comments on YouTube and on social media flew into fits of outrage, called his originality fake and try-hard, and accused his stylistic, classical manner as being incorrect even though it’s crystal clear today and has been for sixty years that criticism of historically inspired performance practise is the musical equivalent of climate change denial. Predictably, he didn’t make the final.
*Of course if you are a real artist nothing feels daring at all, only necessary — that jury members and other viewing musicians fail to know this should be an absolutely gargantuan red flag for the culture on the whole, but nonetheless unsurprising.
So not only did this competition reach a new pinnacle in terms of the subconscious but frantic propagation and validation of all that is stylistically middle-of-the-road and unoriginal, it also reached new heights in terms of the normalisation of being publicly derogative, antagonistic and dismissive of anything truly creative, or informed, or even slightly different to the norm. One prominent professor at an Australian tertiary musical education institution went so far as to publicly, on social media, call Smirnov’s interpretation of music as being “anti-Mozart”, for all their colleagues and students to see. (Prior to this they had also publicly dumped on Patricia Kopatchinskaja in a similar fashion). Perhaps this speaks for itself. One of the anonymous online comments about Smirnov mentioned “poor intonation”; one couldn’t say that his intonation was worse than any of the other competitors, who prepare hours of challenging repertoire to play in a very short amount of time and so for whom it is understandable that there’d be a few near-blips here and there. The thought struck me that perhaps we have reached a nadir where there are music students out there who have never heard a note played without vibrato, and so that this foreign sound might seem out of tune. Such an absurd theory is not so crazy when one considers the number of things young musicians today do not know and/or are not taught**. I’ve lost count of the number of twentysomething instrumentalists I’ve spoken with who have never heard of Ivry Gitlis or Sigiswald Kuijken.
**Which is not to discount the many things that the younger generation know which the older generation cannot comprehend or do not wish to comprehend.
Predictable arguments might be that some people (the Australian professor included) would insist that each competitor was drastically different in their approach, style and interpretation. Goodness knows what these people would then make of the differences between artists like Albert Sammons, Mischa Elman, Ivry Gitlis, Pekka Kuusisto, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Isabelle Faust and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. There’s simply no argument that the most well known violinists of the last 20 years (barring the ones above who are still alive today) could even begin to match the variety of the players who preceded them. And that competitions have probably gone a long way in contributing to this, with their voting systems which by default tend to favour players who are the least divisive, among jurors who are already artistically very plain already.
A second argument to anticipate is that everyone is just doing their best and it’s just a bunch of kids and adult jury members getting together in good spirits to play some nice music.
To which it can be responded that the illusion that it’s all just fun and games with no hard feelings at the end is a bubble — it’s hideous and privileged and the odds are already stacked high for a privileged few. Dozens of these 18-22 years olds are playing instruments worth half a million dollars or sometimes significantly more, on loan to them from banks or private collections. How do they get them? By having huge exposure and a large following. How do they have this? By having popular Instagram and tik tok accounts with hundreds or thousands of fake, “bought” followers***. It would be extraordinary if there’s been a violinist who has won a major international competition in the last 10 years with a violin worth less than $200,000. Many players have string sponsorships alone worth thousands of dollars, and governments sponsoring their flights. Many are representing elite teaching classes, and of course many of these teachers perpetually reside on juries. While the World Federation of International Music Competitions (WFIMC) guidelines outline that teachers should not be allowed to vote for their students, they remain only guidelines: a suggestion, a recommendation, rather than a rule. Competitions aren’t excluded from WFIMC membership if they allow teacher-student voting. All three major international competitions this writer participated in between 2005-2007 allowed it.
***This is a completely normal**** and widespread practise. Many if not most of Australia’s major classical music ensembles and individuals, from string quartets to symphony orchestras, will have hundreds of bought followers. It’s very easy to find them; simply go on Facebook or Instagram, click through a group’s followers and see how many of the profiles have only two or three friends, an anonymous photo, and were created in the last 12 months.
****not according to this writer.
International music competitions are to music what essentially the Indian Premier League is to cricket. All these great players are brought together at very expensive events (the mind boggles at how the money could be better spent) to compete for outrageous sums when they already have outrageous backing and opportunity, to play under circumstance where nothing has any real meaning, in a format which goes against the spirit of what the art had been for hundreds of years.
Of course, there will always be people who are different, and they’ve always gone under the radar and believed in what is important and shrugged at the successes and popularity of the ones who “make it”, knowing they’re doing what’s important for art (one hint — making classical music popular might not be vital. But it’ll make a lot of money — ask Ray). It’s easy to ignore the competition style in this way, until it starts being emulated on a wider scale in which audiences and even most players are actively hostile towards originality and true artistry.
Which is part of why a better type of artist shirks exposure, money, and popularity by being at least comparatively slightly more monastic, and following instead what is real. David Lynch is one of this writer’s favourite artists, and his well-documented brush with the mainstream (Dune, 1984) led to his losing artistic control over the final cut of the film. His own cut was well over three hours, but the studio slimmed it down significantly, rendering the film basically incoherent as a result. He took his name off the film and never made a blockbuster again, returning to smaller budget films where he had total control. Eventually there came a year when one of his most objectively great films was nominated for best director at the Oscars, alongside fellow auteur and unique artist Robert Altman. It can’t be overstated how great their two films were, and still are, more than twenty years later. That they both lost to a different film, one with a decent story with average direction which today is essentially forgotten, isn’t important.
The important part of the story came after the ceremony, when Altman went up to Lynch after their shared loss and said, “It’s better this way David.”
It certainly is. Or perhaps even better — that great artists never competed in the first place. Then again, maybe they never have.
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