Competitions, it is often said, favour a competition style of playing. The middle ground of jury consensus excludes more challenging extremes. The technical will triumph over the musical. The obvious will dominate over the imaginative.
The jury at the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition rejected both Roberto Poli's commanding performance of Sofia Gubaidulina's mid-Sixties mixed-pie of a Piano Sonata and Ashley Wass's sophisticated, kidgloves reserve in a sensually-contoured account of Franck's Prelude, Aria et Finale. Or was it the two players' highly individual but equally absorbing Beethoven that lost them a place in the semi-finals?
Canada's David Jalbert was on safer ground with two pieces from Messiaen's Vingt Regards, firmly, grippingly done, and Estonian Marko Martin must have shot up the rankings with his finely-paced and distinctive handling of Schubert's Sonata in A minor, D784, as well as the savoir-faire of his reading of Liszt's Apres une lecture du Dante.
From there on down, I found myself having a difficult time balancing considerations of style and taste, or, sadly - and more often - the lack of them. Players with some qualities at the better end were Korean Jeong-Won Kim, Briton Alexander Taylor and Taiwanese Chiao-Ying Chang.
Things to forget are Mikhail Dantschenko's wild and distinctly unwonderful playing of Rachmaninov and Prokofiev (completely obliterating the good he had done in the first round), the far too many inadequate accounts of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (don't these players and their teachers really understand what rare gifts it takes to give this piece anything like its due?), and a rather too widespread tendency to take things to extremes, mostly of speed and volume.
A lot of what goes on at an international piano competition can be explained by the desire to deliver what Virgil Thomson used to call the "wow" performance. When everybody's wowing with thunder in the fast lane, you can stand out by not doing that. But, then, maybe most of these young players know that's not the wisest of courses. After all, look what happened to Ashley Wass.
