World’s worst music competition

There are lots of wonderful things to write about. Last month I spent six beautiful days in Antibes, off piano; went to Siberia first time in about three years; been to Moscow and seen pink penguins in the Red Square and Malevich at the Tretyakov Gallery; have had a week of my life working with Imogen Cooper in Provence; the new CD has been launched, and despite fears and suspicions it receives wonderful feedback; I tried the most convincing cacio e pepe ever and even has been taught how to cook it.
Meanwhile, the little distorted alternative world keeps running and fruitlessly brewing just around the corner. Nothing ever changes in the world of music competitions. Six years ago lovely Jerome Lowenthal, nose deep into his notebook, was giving me a detailed account of my performance of a certain Beethoven Sonata, which I have never played. This September (or the next one) same (or another) Lowenthal (probably around the same age) is giving the same detailed account to another competitor (just because I am, thankfully, done with competitions). He (or another wise mummy) will gladly mumble it to anyone who is interested to hear. And if you want to know, it is a wonderful account – it says your playing was really special and the mummy voted for you. Or maybe – surprise! – he didn’t, because you wrongly played Études Symphoniques without the posthumous ones (or because you wrongly played it with the posthumous ones). And also – and this he doesn’t mention – he had to vote his own student in.
Why am I suddenly in the mood for this angry moaning? Because I, thankfully, well remember the times when I was playing in several competitions a year and didn’t dare to whisper a word (but very private ones) against one of the loathsome notable jury members. Neither did I realise the criminal stupidity of many competition organisers, and was letting myself being poisoned by the flood of waste regularly poured into my ears at one of those post-factum jury sessions.
There is no worst musician in the world, but there are many best ones. Paradoxically, there is no best music competition in the world, but there are many, many worst ones. A music competition cannot be fair by definition, because it is in conflict with the very nature of art. It still can do more good than harm by being respectful first of all. And the very foundation of a respecting competition codex is that a) the jury is capable of real listening to what is going on on stage (which most of them aren’t) and b) the jury is protected from having any students of theirs participating. This seem to be as simple and essential as hygiene. But the world goes on and Arie Vardi is again voting for his student in the finals of San Marino, as Pavel Gililov recently did in Bonn, and Zakhar Bron did in Shanghai, same as Boris Kuschnir – both there and in Moscow.