City Hall, Glasgow
As ever, the final of the Scottish International Piano Competition on Saturday night stoked up the emotions. I had a heated discussion at the end, while the jury deliberated, with a group of very distinguished professional musicians as to the likely outcome. We were all wrong.
UK pianist Tom Poster, who played Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, walked off with the first prize of £10,000 and a further £500 for the best performance of the commissioned piece by Judith Weir. Lithuanian pianist Lukas Geniusas won second prize of £5000 after playing Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, Frenchman Tristan Pfaff, playing Prokofiev's second concerto was third with £2500, and Russian Violetta Khachikian, playing Chopin's first concerto, fourth. All eight pianists who made it to the semi-finals received £750, and the final results were based not just on the performances on Saturday but throughout the competition.
Now for the music criticism. Poster's winning performance of the Rachmaninov was splashy, flamboyant, with much swaying and emoting, though with little below the flashy surface. Geniusas's exquisite Beethoven was beautifully poetic and articulate, Pfaff's Prokofiev an interpretation of real Gallic poise and style, though a little underpowered, while Khachikian had song and poetry at her fingertips in the Chopin.
Now the real criticism. All of them were poorly served by conductor James Loughran and the BBC SSO with accompaniments that were inadequately coordinated, badly balanced, lacklustre, woolly in attack, and crucially failing to provide a framework of confident support for the young players.
Lack of rehearsal time might have been one factor, but you could feel the adrenalin draining out of performances that failed to take flight. Not good enough, I'm afraid.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article