SUPPORTING ACTS
It takes hundreds to ensure the smooth running of a competition
Healthy box-office returns and soaring online viewing figures confirm that audiences love the cut and thrust of music competitions. What happens onstage and in the jury room makes them compelling. But most people, competitors and judges included, know little of the enormous backstage efforts required to avoid countless competition pitfalls and potential calamities. International competitions rely on the goodwill of volunteers, ready to host contestants or provide transport. Their staff, meanwhile, must field complaints from anxious young musicians and respond to them skilfully, without pandering to prima donnas or pushing fearful contestants into despair. The behind-the-scenes checklist covers every subject from transport to psychology, digital media to piano technology. Jacques Marquis, president and CEO of the Van Cliburn Competition and treasurer of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, says that his competition could not function without its volunteer network. The Cliburn draws help from between 500 and 800 people. They meet and greet competition candidates at Fort Worth airport, serve as host families, staff the Cliburn gift shop, deliver food and drink to the jury room, and generally prime the pump of enthusiasm throughout the competition’s two-week run. ‘We have a strong volunteer base, which works with our staff, not just on the main competition but on our junior and amateur competitions,’ notes Marquis. ‘The more competitions you do, the better you get at it. We’re like ducks: we can paddle fast beneath the water, but on the surface, we’re cool.’ Piano competitions would be less cool, more stone dead, but for the backstage work of keyboard technicians. Gerrit Glaner, head of the Concert and Artist Department at Steinway in Hamburg, travels the world to ensure his company’s instruments are in top order. His job involves 18-hour days in pursuit of perfection, with meals and sleep snatched between performances and pianos regulated overnight and in the early morning. Small wonder he bristles when the technicians are missing from competition votes of thanks. ‘They often forget to mention the hardest working people in the competition – the piano technicians!’ Glaner points out that a competition can continue if a jury member falls sick; an ailing piano technician, however, can bring proceedings to a halt. A colleague, he recalls, was confined to bed after developing a high fever. ‘The very good local technician helped but it took three days before we could fly our replacement in from London. This was dramatic, because the technician is responsible for keeping up the quality of the instrument and the faith of the pianists.’ Piano competitions face the challenge of providing pianists with an instrument that suits their touch. Gerrit Glaner says that, within reason, technicians always aim to respond to competitors’ feedback. ‘When you have one piano and up to 52 people to play on it, you have to be flexible.’ It is the work of volunteers, meanwhile, that help to make a competition very much part a fabric of its host city. ‘It is important for a competition to be seen as a cultural event in the life of the city,’ says Didier Schnorhk, WFIMC President and the Secretary General of the Concours de Genève, ‘and it is also important for the young competitors to be welcomed by the local people. In Geneva, every competitor is hosted in the house of a family. Those families then become the core of the audience – they come not just to every concert during the competition, but also to concerts given by past laureates when they return in later years. It creates a very strong link between a town and the musicians.’
‘We can paddle fast beneath the water, but on the surface, we’re cool’