Over a long and sunny weekend, the 15 members of the jury of the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition listened to 53 pianists, and a total of over 26 hours of music.
In truth, with only 24 places available in the second round, the opening stage is a bit of a lottery, not usually for the clear leaders or losers but for those who find themselves in the greyness of the middle ground. Those the jury loves or hates have their fates quickly decided. Weighing up the balances for the rest inevitably leads to what may seem like slightly random choices.
The Dublin competition gives players a carte blanche for their opening, 30-minute recital. Some take a hot-and-cold approach, telling you "I'm a sensitive player, but I also do hard pieces", or "I'm a virtuoso, but I can also show restraint".
Bach, Haydn, Mozart and even Clementi provided the lighter fodder for many players in this regard, and were rarely among the composers heard to best advantage. It's not that the music gets submerged by the performers' personalities, but rather that there's a sense of abstract display which often lacks any real sense of musical motivation. And in the grey area, competitors are as likely to sink for something small that offends a lot as swim for a little gem that gives great pleasure.
Like the jury, I listened to all 53 players, posing myself throughout a fundamentally simple question throughout. The jury may worry about all sorts of standards: Who will ultimately be a worthy winner to represent the competition? Who has the breadth of repertoire - or indeed is showing the right sort of temperament - to sustain a career? What I asked myself was: who do I really want to hear again? The first player to strike me in this way was 22-year-old Canadian David Jalbert, whose range encompasses the rigorous mechanisms of Ligeti's Etudes as well as the altogether more flexible inner life of Chopin's Polonaise-Fantaisie. The 26-year-old Russian, Sviatoslav Lips, would hardly have pleased the period-performance fans with his ornamentless Bach, but he turned the C sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of the 48 into compelling listening. And he showed magisterial vision in Sofia Gubaidulina's Chaconne as well as technique in delivering it.
The freest, nimblest Scarlatti came from the 21-year-old Georgian, Marina Nadiradze, whose fine dynamic control and masterly layering of detailed textures were put to mesmerising use in Prokofiev's Second Sonata. Italian Roberto Poli (28) was unceremoniously (and undeservedly) ditched in the first round in 1997. This year he returned with one of the most unusual programmes on offer: Leon Kirchner's Five Pieces of 1987 (which featured in 1997 winner Max Levinson's choices last time out), Byrd's My Ladye Nevels Grownde, and Ravel's La valse. Poli's heavily expressionist approach may not be what Kirchner's seriously overwritten pieces need, but it provided an astonishing contrast to his idiosyncratically-sculpted Byrd. And the Ravel, which is mostly a bore when played on the piano, came to colourful life as he subsumed all its keyboard challenges into a finely-gauged and musically-sensuous swirl.
It has been the fate of Samuel Barber's Piano Sonata to be treated as an overbearing and not quite coherent showpiece. The British pianist Ashley Wass (23) lost nothing in demonstrating his own ability by presenting the work in a more cogently argued manner. It does connect, and without too much bluster, was his very effective message. And his gracefully fluid handling of Beethoven's Andante favori was a real pleasure, too. Beethoven of a different hue came from the 19-year-old Taiwanese Chiao-Ying Chang. She brought a dynamically exciting thrust to the opening movement of the Sonata in C minor, Op 111 (a place where many a young player oversteps the mark), and was nearly as fine in the closing Arietta.
Ukrainian Mikhail Dantschenko (22) treated Clementi (the Sonata in F sharp minor, Op 26 No 2) as if he were a not-very-convincing reincarnation of Scarlatti. And then he dropped all pretence with a thrilling performance of Brahms's Paganini Variations, in which he handled everything the piece threw at him (and that's a lot) with musical sensitivity and virtuoso keyboard mastery.
Two Irish players, Maria McGarry (22) and David McNulty (20), have made it into the second round. Both were at the positive end of the grey area on my personal list, which ranked Conor Linehan (28) rather higher (mainly for his handling of the second movement of the Janacek Sonata). The other Irish players, Isabelle O'Connell (21) and Peter Tuite (23), both suffered at the very least from what seemed to me to be unwise repertoire choices. It calls for fine judgement, deciding what to show about yourself in the first 30 minutes of an international piano competition.
The second round of the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition takes place at the RDS on Wednesday and Thursday. The surviving competitors (in playing order) are Damian Girvan, Rinko Hama, David Jalbert, Jeong-Won Kim, Chenyin Li, Sviatoslav Lips, Maria McGarry, David McNulty, Marko Martin, Alexei Nabioulin, Marina Nadiradze, Kiai Nara, Joonas Pohjonen, Roberto Poli, Matthias Soucek, Evgeny Sudbin, Alexander Taylor, Ashley Wass, Alessandra Ammara, Katya Apekisheva, Lidija Bizjak, Chiao-Ying Chang, Mikhail Dantschenko and Kirill Gerstein
