Canadian quartet takes top honours in Banff
BANFF, ALBERTA— When the youthful members of Canada’s Rolston String Quartet went to bed Sunday evening, they took to their pillows the knowledge of having just won one of the world’s most important contests of its kind, the triennial Banff International String Quartet Competition. When they woke up Monday morning, they found themselves in the enviable position of confronting an international career.
For during the night, offers had already started coming in from producers on both sides of the international border eager to showcase the next emerging ensemble to perform what is often regarded as the most sophisticated literature in western music.
Theirs is not, to be sure, the only such emerging talent. From an array of Asian, European and North American applicants, 10 string quartets were invited to compete in a week of concerts at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, any one of whom could have been called career ready.
Perhaps that is why Peter Salaff, director of string chamber music at the Cleveland Institute of Music, a founding member of the Cleveland Quartet and one of Banff’s seven jurors, was able to remark at the competition’s close, “This is really a festival rather than a competition. It is unique.”
In most high-level music competitions, competitors are progressively eliminated after each round. In this one, all the quartets could be heard in the rounds preceding the finals, performing in the first round a quartet by Haydn and a 20th-century work; in the second, a quartet from the romantic or nationalistic repertoire and, in the third, a specially commissioned new piece by Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri. Each of the non-finalist quartets received a $4,000 career development grant.
In the finals, the Castalian String Quartet from the United Kingdom and the Tesla Quartet from Russia, South Korea and the U.S.A. joined the Rolston in playing a quartet by Beethoven or Schubert as well.
From the audience’s point of view — and Banff’s international audience, listening to almost 50 hours of music, numbered among the most attentive I have ever encountered — the result more closely resembled a series of concerts than a contest.
It isn’t an easy world these musicians are entering. When I was a young music student (and in Dorothy Parker’s pithy phrase, “no one was safe from buffaloes”), the internationally active string quartets could be numbered on one’s fingers. Today, Canada alone boasts a larger number than that.
Austria’s Hagen Quartet, who came in second to the Colorado Quartet in the first Banff competition in 1983, has since achieved one of the major careers in chamber music, along with such subsequent competitors as the 1992 winners, Canada’s St. Lawrence Quartet (who will be presented by Music Toronto at the St. Lawrence Centre Jan. 26), and the all-female Cecilia String Quartet, winners in 2010.
And speaking of female, few were the women occupying positions in string quartets when this competition began. This year, every foursome included at least one. The reason? As Barry Shiffman, executive director of the competition as well as a founding member of the St. Lawrence Quartet and associate dean of the Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School, put it, paraphrasing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “it’s 2016.”
For coming in third, the Castalian Quartet took away an $8,000 prize and a Banff Centre residency. As second-prize winner, the Tesla garnered $12,000 and a residency, besides winning prizes for the best performance of a Haydn quartet and best performance of the Canadian piece.
And as overall winner, the Rolston could look forward to $25,000, a compact disc recording, residencies, tours (including a concert in Toronto presented by the Women’s Musical Club) and even an appearance at the palace of Haydn’s Austro-Hungarian benefactor, Prince Ester- hazy. They are currently still enrolled as graduate quartet in residence at Rice University in Houston.
Whether violinists Luri Lee and Jeffrey Dyrda, violist Hezekiah Leung and cellist Jonathan Lo will live out their professional lives as the Rolston Quartet remains, of course, to be seen. They already belong to a generation of string players performing at a level difficult to imagine in generations past.
For as one of their listeners, Mervon Mehta, executive director of performing arts at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, enthused, “I was flabbergasted by the level of the competition, not just of the Rolston Quartet but of all 10 competing quartets.”