The Olympics of piano, as I like to call it 😊
The Chopin competition takes place every 5 years (although this time we waited 6 due to covid), in Warsaw, Poland. For the first time in history, Canada won the grand prize!! 🇨🇦 We also placed 6th, which is no small feat. Over 500 pianists from 53 countries around the world applied to be contestants in this competition. 160 of these were admitted to perform in the preliminary round. This in itself is an honour. 87 of those pianists were accepted into the competition. From there, more competitors were eliminated with each of the three stages, until there were only finalists. Talk about gruelling! The amount of pressure is unimaginable. All of the competitors had been dreaming of this moment, many of them for their entire lives. If they win, they’re basically set for life. They will never lack musical engagements; people will always know who they are in the classical music world. They will travel the world playing concerts, students will want to learn from them, professional musicians will want to collaborate with them, they will record albums…. and this is all on top of the €40,000 grand prize! (This amounts to nearly $60,000 CAD).
Back to the competition itself. The pressure increases with each stage. The repertoire requirements are extremely demanding, and if you make a mistake you’re eliminated automatically. Wrong notes are unacceptable. This is why there is some controversy surrounding these types of competitions. When Chopin played his own compositions, he was always changing them by adding embellishments, changing dynamics, experimenting with different phrasing, etc. He was even changing the notes he had written down, up until the very last second when he had to send it to the publisher. Often his various publishers would receive different copies if he sent them off at even slightly varied times. To him, the utmost importance was that of musical expression. So why must the performances for a competition dedicated to his music be note-perfect? Doesn’t this inhibit musical creativity and expression? Aren’t the performers so terrified of wrong notes that they aren’t willing to try out their best ideas? I guess you just have to be the most musical of the perfect performances 😅 I certainly think that deserves an award!🥇
Here is Canada’s champion pianist, Bruce (Xiaoyu) Liu’s performance in stage 3: