Winning isn’t everything at piano contest

So another piano competition has ended and another career begun. Business as usual.

Or maybe not quite as usual. Calgary’s triennial Honens Piano Competition, which concluded last weekend, is about more than awarding the largest cash prize of its kind, $100,000, to an aspiring keyboard virtuoso.

For one thing, Italy’s Luca Buratto can look forward to three years of professional management, a Hyperion record contract, recitals in such major international centres as Berlin, London, Paris, New York and Toronto, and mentoring opportunities with some of the leading pianists of our day, a total career development package valued at $500,000.

If, after this, he isn’t effectively launched, it won’t be for lack of trying.

His predecessor, Pavel Kolesnikov, has been effectively launched, his initial Hyperion recording a declared success and his artistry already recognized internationally.

Now London-based, he returned to Calgary to take part in this year’s event and the pianist I heard had matured impressively from the talented youngster I’d encountered three years earlier.

At the age of 22, the youngest competitor in this year’s semifinals and finals, Buratto exhibited similar promise. Indeed, he was the only one of the three finalists I would have voted into the finals.

But then, experience as a judge in other international competitions has convinced me of the subjectivity of assessing potential in young musicians. The distinguished French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who returned this year to play and mentor the contestants, did not himself win the first Honens competition in 1992, and the pianist who did win is virtually unheard of today.

Competitions at this level, and Calgary’s does count, throw a momentary spotlight on talent. How that talent develops depends on many factors, luck not excluded.

To begin with, the winner has to be ready to take advantage of the opportunity presented. The Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia controversially awarded its first prize to an inexperienced, phenomenally musical 18-year-old from China, who was promptly launched on a gruelling concert schedule that effectively burned him out within two years.

The Honens competition, aware of the danger, has made its career development plan arguably more important than its initial prize.

Calgary’s professed goal, according to artistic director Stephen McHolm, is to identify “the complete pianist,” a designation that helps explain why its 10 semifinalists from seven countries (not including Canada this year) had to participate in chamber-music-making with soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, clarinetist James Campbell and violist Hsin-Yun Huang.

A recognition of real-world realities seems also to have influenced the choice of jury members, the majority of whom were not active concert pianists but rather representatives of music management.

Would a jury dominated by active pianists have decided differently? That question must remain open.

I can’t remember being particularly impressed by Bavouzet back in 1992. I was definitely impressed last week. The Honens was a beginning for him.

By the way, the name has recently changed. It is now known officially as the Honens Festival and Piano Competition, an obvious effort to give the event less of the character of a pure contest.

And if the response of the pianists who made it into the semifinals can be taken as evidence, they took the change seriously. Above all else, the 11 days in Calgary were about making music.