Piano Competitions: Positive and Negative Effects on Young Musicians.

[nlunch]

Dear colleagues! I would like to talk and discuss the effects of piano competitions. We all know that competitions help to build the career in music these days. But it comes to the point when the market is over saturated with prizewinners. Some of them are active for a long time, but the majority of prize winners disappear from the sight in a matter of few years. Please share your ideas about alternative ways to make a career in music, how young artists could market themselves, are there any suggestions about the repertoire young students should pay attention to in order to create their own "language" in music? Feel free to discuss these ideas on here. Thanks!

[ramseytheii]

Dear colleagues! I would like to talk and discuss the effects of piano competitions. We all know that competitions help to build the career in music these days. But it comes to the point when the market is over saturated with prizewinners. Some of them are active for a long time, but the majority of prize winners disappear from the sight in a matter of few years. Please share your ideas about alternative ways to make a career in music, how young artists could market themselves, are there any suggestions about the repertoire young students should pay attention to in order to create their own "language" in music? Feel free to discuss these ideas on here. Thanks!

Competitions should be best seen as a particular business model.  They are by now, a very diffuse and slightly tired imitation of spectacular successes that came when competitions were peripheral.  Obviously the spectacle I am referring to primarily is the Tchaikovsky Competition of 1958.  There were others, but that is certainly the first in modern times to set the tone for what everybody tries to do today.

Competitions are often started by people with a peripheral interest in music, who have a general interest in the investments of advertisers and the hobnobbing with prominent judges and sponsors.  To take them too seriously is to misunderstand their origins, in my opinion.

I personally feel, and don't really have any objective information to back this up, that the business model that classical music relies on is set for collapse.  People need to adopt more to things that seem anathema to classical music, like selling single tracks on iTunes, in order to forge a new business model to be successful.

In this sense, Glenn Gould was way ahead of his time.  Remember, he not only abandoned the concert stage, he eventually abandoned the recording studio - the studio as sponsored by a record company.  He bought the equipment himself, and was able to record from his own home.  What does everyone do now?  They use their digital equipment, be it camcorders, cameras, or microphones, and edit and produce their works from personal computers.  Pianists of the future have to find a way to bypass the old, tired, business models, and innovate themselves into relevancy.

Walter Ramsey

[pytheamateur]

Does winning a particular music competition tells much about how good the person's playing is?  It is not something objective like a sports competitions: the results depend on the jury and the participants entering that particular year.

Just some examples of how various pianists did at various competitions:

Vladimir Krainev failed to win the Leeds Competition but won first prize at the Tchaikovsky a few years letter.  Dimitri Alexeev won the Leeds but failed to win the Tchaikovsky. Jianing Kong won 6th prize at the Leeds in 2009 but was knocked out of the Tchaikovsky after the first round.

Coleen Lee won 5th prize at the Chopin Competition in 2005 but failed to win the Hong Kong Piano Competition later in the same year.  However, the winner of the latter, Ilya Rashkovsky got knocked out after the second round of the Chopin Competition in 2010.