After three intense days of musicmaking, lectures, interviews, conversations and masterclasses, the 11th Banff International String Quartet Competition’s day of silence is a great moment to regroup — and reflect. What does this event actually do for chamber music?
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
The obvious answer — it helps crown the latest and greatest of string quartets — is also the wrong answer, according to Banff competition director Barry Shiffman. “I tell the quartets that If you came here to win, you’ve already lost,” he declared with a smile at his welcome breakfast for media people on Monday morning.
I suspect that the same answer would apply to any competition that believes it can make an ensemble’s career with laurels and cash. The world is awash in competitions, so much so that the 56-year-old World Federation of Music Competitions does not provide a number but opens its home page with a database search by category.
The 120-odd competitions accredited by them stand in front of at least twice that number of unaccredited competitions.
I’ve counted up 18 international competitions that feature or include string quartets — six of them major — and are the objects of intense interest by ensembles around the world. It’s interesting to see how some of this week’s entrants have won competitions elsewhere in the last couple of years.
The Melbourne competition in Australia happens every four years. It’s last winners were the Attacca String Quartet, which were also laureates in the most recent Osaka competition, held every three years, like Banff. The Calidore String Quartet placed third in the last ARD competition in Munich. The Gémaux Quartet was a finalist in the last Joseph Haydn competition. The Schumann Quartett aced the last Franz Schubert competition.
You get the picture.
It’s the same story for violinists and pianists and singers. There is a sort of competition culture out there, where the same faces chase similar prizes while too often failing to lay a solid foundation for a sustained professional career.
The savvy competitions are doing something about this, and it’s nice to see Canadians among the world leaders. Calgary-based Honens International Piano Competition has made how they choose their laureates and how they can help develop their careers a calling card. Just up the Trans-Canada Highway — way up — is Banff, which is also choosing and boosting wisely.
The Banff first-prize package comes with cash, a set of new bows and, most significantly, three years of mentoring, concert tours, a sponsored collaboration in the creation of a new work and the production of an album at Banff Centre.
Watching the quartets in action here, I was struck by how conservative the artform itself is: the men continue to wear black shirts or suits and few of the women dare to put on eyecatching colours. The four players sit (or stand, in the case of the Anima Quartet) in a close circle. They don’t speak. It’s only about the music.
So it’s good to see that outreach is also a central component in the mentoring process that the Banff laureates will go through.
Schiffman, thanks to his own experience as a founding member of the St Lawrence String Quartet and the wide web of contacts he has built up over the past 25 years, believes that outreach, including work with children in at-risk neighbourhoods, is the key to perpetuating and growing the string quartet artform.
The audience at the Banff competition is knowledgeable and committed. But by raising the money to provide a live online stream of each competition round (the impoverished, threadbare CBC is but the carrier), and by also finding the means to send a quartet out into the world with guides and supporters and ideas, the plan is that more and more people will succumb to the strings’ charms and become knowledgeable and committed fans of chamber music.
Everyone wins — not just the laureates.
+++
The live stream of competition recitals resumes on Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern here.
In case you missed the live stream, the first three days of competition recitals have been archived here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
