NO one I've spoken to about them actually seems to like the idea of music competitions. There are complaints about music being turned into a sort of spectator sport - who can play fastest? Or loudest? Or sing a note longest? There are complaints about juries choosing lowest common denominator, least likely to disturb styles of playing, about the jury system itself working against the selection of forcefully expressed, highly individual talent, about the triumph of technique over musicality. There are complaints about narrowing of repertoire (because of concentration on competition pieces), of self consciously moulded competition playing style (as a direct attempt to please a jury). The list could go on and on, and a lot of the points are not without justification. Yet, cavil as they may, young musicians seem as eager as ever to enter the fray.
The RTE Musician of the Future Competition, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is open to the further criticism of engaging in boundary crossing judgments (pitting a flautist against a pianist against a trumpeter, and so on) and has currently a strange prohibition to keep composers from taking the top prize (so a new Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Prokofiev, Messiaen or Britten will reach the top only through their instrumental skills!).
Yet, ultimately, it's not by the foibles of its rules and regulations that a competition is judged, but by its results. And that's where the RTE competition has always scored. One of the first winners, in 1976, was the 17 year old Hugh Tinney, now an aristocrat among Irish pianists.
Some of Tinney's successors have established careers in orchestras. Maighread McCrann (1982) is the leader of the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra (incidentally, the first woman to lead a major orchestra in Vienna), Michael D'Arcy (1987) leads the RTE Concert Orchestra, and trombonist Donal Bannister (1980) is ensconced in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
You could, of course, argue that, with an entry field that's at once both clearly determined (by the population of the island of Ireland) and wide open (through its broad mixture of categories) the competition is almost guaranteed to strike lucky. Well, if so, that's surely to its credit, or rather to the credit of its director, RTE's Jane Carty who, after all, did have the foresight to develop the first national competition to have concerto performance with an orchestra as part of its challenge, and take seriously its winners' career development through follow up engagements (not to mention broadcasts).
The competition has developed over the years (originally there was no overall winner - Hugh Tinney shared the laurels with flautist Deirdre Brady and cellist Frank Schafer), and although the current broad formula has been established since 1985, modifications of section categories are still being made on an ongoing basis. "Things have to develop and evolve," says Jane Carty, pointing out that, in a changing musical world, "once it was static, it would be dead."
FOR the competition's best known winner, Hugh Tinney, the success came bat a crucial time. "It was like the culmination of all the local competitions I'd won here. I saw it as a rounding off of competitions in this country." In the same year he played the Rachmaninov Second Concerto for the first time, went on television and soon he began to direct his career away from a maths degree and towards music. No fewer than 98 young hopefuls entered the competition this year with the intention of emulating his success. The final handful will work through the ultimate struggle in front of an international jury at the NCH on Tuesday 30th.
