The final rankings were:
1 Daye Lin (China)
2 Daniel Smith (Australia)
3 Brandon Keith Brown (USA).
The last competition in 2010 was tainted by allegations of vote-rigging by an influential jury member. This time, we haven’t heard a whisper of impropriety, but the man who came third was the stand-out audience favourite. So who’s going to leak what went on in the jury room?
Can anybody imagine Mahler or Kleiber saying they studied conducting at a music school? They would have both laughed their socks off!!! Less have a flashy website to promote themselves.
How does this have anything to do with the subject? If you’re a good conductor, you deserve the podium, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter how you learned because it’s something that isn’t taught in private lessons these days.
If you would prefer young musicians to make a career in the global “market” of 2012 with the means of 1900, please show how it’s done! As for (Carlos) Kleiber, he studied conducting as anyone else. That he had access to such people as Bruno Walter is an advantage that few of us share.
Conducting was taught in the conservatories in 19th Century Germany, as it is today. Felix Mottl is a prime example of such a conservatory professor who taught conducting. However, more likely, after graduating from a conservatory in another discipline, one would become either a rehearsal pianist in an opera house, or a conductor’s assistant and hope they would take a shine to you. It was an apprenticeship set-up. Shoe makers, plumbers, carpenters also operated on the same system then and still do today. Now young folks go to technical schools to learn trades and apprentice for a much shorter period of time. For young conductors, it is still essentially the same thing.
In regard to web-sites, most conductors at all levels have flashy websites managed by their artist managers. That’s one way to market the maestro. I know a number of them have their own facebook pages, some of the big names actually handle their facebook pages themselves..
I thought the earliest evidence of conservatory training was 1905? Please correct me if I’m wrong as I’m curious about this.
Hello Mr Lebrecht. I arrived to your page from searching the competition at this moment. I was inside the public for this in the morning today and it was the second award who has received the most big ovation from the public. May be your information is made a mistake? All very good conductors today. Thankyou. Simone Raksar.
It is difficult to say what happened, but, the third prize winner received feedback from the jury that his time management during the rehearsal yesterday became a deciding factor in the decision. It was clearly stated to the public by Rolf Breuer (ex head of the Deutsche Bank… who has no vote) that the performance today was not the only deciding factor in the jury’s decision.
Cheers from within the orchestra
Thaddeus
To Alan: obviously it’s best of all to learn conducting on the podium from very beginning (and with Berlin/Chicago/NY Philharmonic in front!). Or even better: play CD’s. Conducting teachers … what an absurd!
Bravo Daniel – very talented and brilliantly deserved!
I think conducting competitions (in fact all classical music contests) are prone to corruption. More often than not the teachers of the competitors are on the jury. This cannot be right as bias is surely inevitable, often resulting in the wrong person winning. For example, in recent decades, there has been much controversy over whether the right player has won the Leeds Piano Competition (probably once revered as the world’s foremost showcase in spotting genuine young pianistic talent as opposed to million notes per-second robotic merchants). So, as a result, the competition has lost its past credibility.
There should be a balance of people on competition juries- not just performers (who often have strong views about how a piece should be played/conducted) but critics, impressarios and even a musical businessman who hear and like as they find. I think it was Nadia Boulanger who once said ‘If you’re interested in music don’t go to competitions’. The great pianist and academic Charles Rosen has also said that what a competition jury and the general music loving public want to hear from a performer are often very different. Norman has also referred to this in his excellent book ‘When the Music Stops’.
In the case of the Solti Competition and so many others, it concerns me that so many Chinese competitors are winning. True, some wonderful young musicians are emerging out of China. But the cynic in me thinks that this is partly owing to the fact that China is one of the few countirs in the world able to fund the classical music industry, which is on the verge of extinction. The movers and shakers know this and realise how important the Chinese market is in preventing post millenium catastrophe.
Mark,
I agree with much of your comment, but your last observation left me puzzled. I had always associated China with rampant copyright abuse, CD faking, photocopying manuscripts and not paying royalties. Happy to learn if this is wrong. Could you elaborate on how China is able to fund the classical music industry. I’d like to understand this better. Thanks.
Conducting competitions are entertainment and show biz. And PR campaigns of the issuing institution. Just look at the Palmares of just about any conducting competition in the past. Short lived, hyped, candidates that did it with acting and temperament and were quickly forgotten soon after or dimple along in mediocrity. Few exceptions apply. Also the whole concept is just nonsense and damaging the artistic values. You can compete for higher, faster, more goals, but you can’t compete about music itself.
To hell with conducting competitions.
Abbado, Rattle, Jansons, Gergiev, Dudamel, Noseda, Petrenko, Bringuier etc etc
Yeah well, would they not have made it without those competitions? The question is, if in times when there were no conducting competitions, there also were no good conductors?