Audience the winner in quartet showdown
BANFF, ALTA.— The roar rising from the packed crowd in the Banff Centre’s Eric Harvey Theatre on Sunday afternoon could hardly have been more eloquent. The Viano Quartet had just played the most exciting single performance of the entire 13th triennial Banff International String Quartet Competition.
Ten quartets, with players representing eight countries of Europe, Asia and North America, had spent the week in morning, afternoon and evening competition, playing close to 50 hours of music before a seven-member international jury composed of some of the foremost interpreters of chamber music of our day.
As music competitions go, they don’t get much tougher than this one. So when the foursome from Canada and the United States capped Sunday’s finals with a dazzling reading of Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59,
No. 3, the audience understandably erupted.
So did they win? It wasn’t quite that simple.
The jurors submitted cumulative marks after each of the competition’s preceding four rounds, during which the quartet literature from Haydn to Whittall was comprehensively explored.
And in case you were wondering about the last mentioned gentleman, Matthew Whittall is the latest Canadian composer to produce a compulsory piece for the competition, submitting in Bright Ferment (String Quartet No.2) one of the most listener-friendly offerings so far. And yes, the Viano Quartet did win the Canadian Composition Prize in honour of the R.S. Williams and Sons Company. But so did Britain’s Marmen Quartet, which also shared the competition’s overall first prize.
It was the first time in the competition’s history that the jury chose two winners (America’s Callisto Quartet came in second), to the audience’s obvious delight.
The prize is a substantial one, involving not only cash and a list of engagements on both sides of the Atlantic but an ensemble in residence fellowship at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, plus further residences at the Banff Centre (in part to produce a recording) and at Stanford University with the St. Lawrence Quartet.
As a launching pad, a young quartet could hardly ask for more. And in the case of the Marmen Quartet, the prize followed on the heels of a firstprize victory in another of the world’s leading chamber music showcases — France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition.
In a brief press conference following the awards ceremony, violist Bryony GibsonCornish of the Marmen Quartet nevertheless confessed that “we feel competitions are a necessary evil,” but added “we would not be the quartet we are” without them.
Ah, there’s the rub. Chamber music is about collegiality, not competition, yet a competition such as Banff’s, which seeks to humanize the experience (Joel Krosnick, former cellist of the Juilliard Quartet was even engaged as a mentor for participants), offers a growth opportunity difficult to resist.
Everyone won something. Even the seven quartets eliminated from the finals were given a $4,000 career-development award. And their competition rounds were, after all, real concerts, involving complete works.
I have attended many music competitions over the years, sometimes as a juror, sometimes as a member of the audience. What recommends this one to me is that it has more of the atmosphere of a festival, a musical celebration, than of an athletic contest. Frankly, the nature of the music demands no less.
The real challenge for the 10 quartets is to sustain their careers. The St. Lawrence Quartet, who won in 1992, has gone on to substantial international acclaim. The Cecilia Quartet, who won in 2010, has already disbanded.
Barry Shiffman, the competition’s director as well as associate dean of the Glenn Gould School of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, laughingly says of string quartets today that “they are coming out of the woodwork.” There probably never have been more aspiring musicians eager to take on the challenge of what Shiffman calls “the greatest music ever written.”
Whether there are lasting careers for them remains an open question. In a public interview with Shiffman, Philip Setzer, veteran violinist with America’s celebrated Emerson Quartet as well as a Banff juror, identified the repertoire as what drives quartet players, what makes them accept “the craziness” of their profession.
Consider how crazy it is. Quartet players typically spend more time with each other than with their families and earn individually a quarter of the fee commanded by a soloist of similar stature.
And yet, in listening to the young performers at Banff speak about their career choice I heard only about love, challenge and rewards. So maybe there are worse things than being this kind of crazy.