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The most exciting and innovative music competitions look to their local surroundings for fresh cultural inspiration and colour
Questions about social and cultural impact have come to dominate discussions of the arts in recent years. Members of the World Federation of International Music Competitions understand the importance of supplying practical answers, of turning high-minded ideals about community cohesion and engagement into actually existing programmes open to all. Delegates at this year’s WFIMC General Assembly in Norrköping will have the chance to explore how the local Wilhelm Stenhammar International Music Competition has become indispensable to the Swedish city’s cultural life and is broadening its community reach. They can also learn from the experience of others who have tailored their operating models to suit the cultural needs and aspirations of their home markets.
Sonja Stenhammar, founder and artistic director of the Wilhelm Stenhammar International Music Competition, is a wholehearted believer in communication. The former opera singer, an inspirational teacher, remains a generous-hearted, unstoppable force of nature. The Swedish-born soprano, a direct descendant of the composer and conductor Wilhelm Stenhammar, decided to create a singing competition soon after the death of her husband, the conductor Pierre Colombo, who served for many years as WFIMC President. ‘I wanted to do something for young singers at the start of their careers,’ she recalls. ‘Sweden had no competition in the Federation, so I decided to look at Norrköping, where I went to school before going to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm. I found that the town was completely different from what I remembered from over 30 years before.’
What had been a post-industrial city in decline was now a major centre for culture, a member of UNESCO’S creative cities network, with a fine symphony orchestra on the up and a major investment programme in cultural infrastructure. Local politicians and the community welcomed Sonja Stenhammar and her proposal to create an international competition in Norrköping. The Wilhelm Stenhammar International Music Competition was launched as a biennial event in 2005. Its
Norrköping is a major centre for culture, with a fine symphony orchestra.
many advantages include working with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra at the De Geerhallen, a 1,300-seat venue in the heart of the city, and supportive local politicians.
‘Our competition has been a member of the WFIMC since 2009,’ notes Sonja Stenhammar. ‘I’m very happy about this fantastic connection. We also have very good connections with the politicians here in Norrköping and now in Stockholm.’ For all Norrköping’s enthusiasm, wouldn’t it have been easier to build an international competition in the country’s capital? Stenhammar believes not. Norrköping, she says, is the right size for the Stenhammar Competition to be noticed by all. ‘Stockholm is too big. There are around 140,000 in the Norrköping municipality, which makes it possible to build strong relationships with local people. I know many singing competitions around the world as a jury member, and think that Norrköping is the ideal place for singers to come. We take the whole town with us during the competition.’
Based in Tromsø, around 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle, the Top of the World International Piano Competition set several records with its first edition ten years ago.
The biennial event claimed the title for the furthest north among international classical music competitions; it also offered heavyweight cash prizes, matching the benchmark set by the Beethoven Competition in Bonn and beating the level offered by any other startup competition. This year’s Top of the World Competition, set to run from 15-21 June 2019, will award a first prize of 30,000, a second of 20,000 and third of 10,000, impressive figures that demand serious fundraising efforts. The Top of the World receives little support from local government and nothing from Norway’s central government. ‘The politicians cannot see the use of supporting the competition,’ notes its artistic director, Tori Stødle. ‘When one competition comes to the end, we have to start raising money for the next from scratch. It’s very difficult.’
Rather than accept the status quo, Stødle instead has built deep inroads into the local community with outreach initiatives such as mini concerts in town squares, hospitals and parks and masterclasses in schools and colleges. Thanks to a major Chinese sponsor, she has exported the Top of the World’s work to Asia. The new arrangement began in January with the launch of the Top of the World International Youth Piano Competition in Jinan in Eastern China, a multi-round event set to conclude in May. Tromsø audiences will have the chance to hear seven concerts and related masterclasses across the 2019-20 season given by Top of the World prize laureates to celebrate the competition’s tenth anniversary. ‘This has been welcomed by the politicians here. They’re very interested in this project and what we’re doing in China. It has taken ten years to get them interested, but their response so far has been very encouraging.’
When it comes to impressing politicians and potential sponsors, Tori Stødle says that membership of the WFIMC matters. ‘It shows that we’re a serious competition,’ she notes. ‘And it helps us with international connections. Our cooperation with China means that we will get another million Norwegian krone (£89,000) from our Chinese sponsor for our next competition, which is very important for us. We know that we have to expand and be imaginative in what we do.’
Imagination has been key to the development of the Hong Kong International Piano Competition (HKIPC), a true labour of love for its founders, Anabella Levin-freris and her husband Andrew Freris. The triennial
competition, first staged in 2005, grew out of their well-established Chopin Society of Hong Kong. The HKIPC has chosen to upturn competition convention for its fifth edition in October this year. ‘We decided we’re going to go for it this time,’ says Levin-freris. ‘Going for it’ involved reconstituting the competition from bottom to top.
Prospective candidates were invited to upload digital video audition recordings to the competition’s secure cloud server for anonymised assessment by its international jury. Those chosen for the first round will also be judged on their video submissions to leave 15 musicians to contest the semi-finals in Hong Kong in July. The online process, explains Levin-freris, was designed to remove the nerve-racking, often interminable routine of competition first and second rounds. ‘We will pay for everything for those invited to come to Hong Kong. They will be like any artist who comes to our Joy of Music Festival. Each will give a full recital with an intermission and have a completely free choice of repertoire, apart from having to play two short commissions from Nimrod Borenstein and Chen Yi. There
The HKIPC has upturned competition convention for its fifth Edition.
will be only two recitals a day and we will pay each musician for performing.’
The HKIPC’S six finalists will return to Hong Kong in October for the competition’s twopart conclusion, the first devoted to chamber music, the second to concertos chosen from a prescribed list. All participants will again receive a fee for their public performance, with the top three receiving enhanced cash prizes. ‘We hope we are creating a very different atmosphere with this,’ observes Levin-freris. ‘We want this to be a real festival of piano playing and for it to be as natural as possible.’ The new model, she adds, will augment the programme of the Chopin Society’s Joy of Music Festival, which includes recitals by the competition’s jury members, and complement the promotion in Hong Kong and beyond of its new Club of Winners.
‘Every October our winners will come to Hong Kong. And we have sent them to all the capitals and major cities in Asia, in countries from India to Vietnam, China to Korea,
Malaysia to the Philippines. It’s fantastic to see them developing each year.’ Levin-freris has also delivered dates for winners’ club members in Uruguay, her home country, and Greece, her husband’s. ‘This group is growing organically, so the competition is only the start of our relationship with the winners.’