At this competition, all winners were students of the judges
OrchestrasResults of the first Karol Lipinski international violin competition in Wroclaw, Poland:
1st prize – Karolina Podorska
2nd prize – Barbara Żołnierczyk
3rd prize – Milena Pioruńska
Distinction – Reika Sato
The jury, chaired by Konstanty Kulka, comprised 4 Poles and a Romanian (so much for ‘international’). And all the prize winners were current or past students of jury members.
Will this fixing never end?
pictured: Podorska
Welcome to polish “International” competitions…..
It’s a new competition. In time there may be entrants from further afield.
Another Lipinski International Everything Competition in Poland, tied up under the political shell of a so called China- Europe International Culture Arts Festival in 2019, nominated almost all Chinese prize winners with their own Chinese professor sitting in the Jury. Coincidentally, the conductor who won there only by selling fancy words he hypothesized at home, has recently just taken first prize in Fitelberg, another Polish competition again. Funny, and sympathy for this country.
Perhaps a more important point is the realization that by next week winning this competition won’t make any difference. With so many organizations invested in the immense profitability (within the performing arts industry) of hosting an international competition the value of recognition in winning one of these pony shows is derived mostly from bad press: now we know who these young violinists are
It is not ‘fixing’ but an incredible, unforeseen, remarkable coincidence… and proof of the excellence of the jury members as teachers!
John! Welcome back!
We really had IT trouble here & it all began when SD took its annual website repair. I think they used screwdrivers and axes, we were blocked by invisible obstacles of seemingly immense size. I even got a computer bug of it all and was coughing for weeks! I thought mr Lebrecht finally got so wise as to block my boss, but no he reassured me they were as mystified as we were. A veil of mourning landed on the building here & daily moods of authoritarian suppression of staff. But my work got finally done properly…. no distraction! no forced messaging on SD! Now everybody is happy here except me.
Sally
Why not make it closed, just for present/past students of the Jury. This is so NOT RIGHT.
Why ‘unforeseen’? Had neither the competitors nor jury members any idea of teaching/studying connections?
It actually doesn’t matter, Lipinski competition has been irrelevant for decades, it will make no impact on the international scene
According to the story this is the first. Not so? Or else how can it have been irrelevant for decades?
All the decades when it did not exist.
Rather than a drip feed of apparent fixing, I’d welcome a detailed analysis, or even two.
One could be an exposure of competitions and judges in which there are grounds for suspicion of fixing.
The other could be a comparison of the subsequent career success of winners of apparently fixed and unfixed competitions.
And what is the solution? To eliminate any judges whose students choose to enter? The automatically disqualify any entrant whose teacher is a judge? Some of these must be the equitable decision — though we know deals are made, tit for tat. It is difficult.
The solution should be predicated on what is revealed by the analysis. This drip feed simply gives us anecdotes, not analysis.
Having taught for 50 years & entered students in competitions, I would not adjudicate where my students competed, neither where MY teachers adjudicated. It made for quite a juggling act, but necessary for fairness sake.
Yes. Competitions should avoid inviting teachers to be judges. Many teachers encourage their students to apply to competitions that they’ve been asked to judge.
It’s a problem very easily solved.
When you say “teachers”, do you mean anyone who teaches or coaches in the discipline to anybody, anywhere in the world? If so, you will find that the pool of qualified candidates for the judging panel will be rather restricted, since the vast majority of professional musicians do some teaching.
Surely, a better solution would be to mandate that each entrant is required to complete and sign a form at the time of entry confirming that there is no conflict of interest involving any of the judges (normally, the names of the judges are published in advance), with any failure to declare a potential or actual conflict of interest resulting in instant disqualification without any refund. There would, of course, need to be clear and transparent criteria defining what constitutes a conflict of interest and how to deal with borderline cases such as “I participated in a one-off public masterclass with juror X five years ago, but have not had any other contact” or “I played principal Y in an orchestral concert that involved juror X as a concerto soloist, and we had a 5-minute chat in the interval in which I got his/her autograph and he/she commented favourably on my playing”, and a procedure for ambiguous cases involving the entrant declaring the potential conflict and the competition administrator deciding whether to permit the entry (the purpose of such a procedure being to absolve a competitor from liability should he/she declare any relevant information in good faith and the competition administrator fails to grasp why it is an egregious conflict of interest). Where one or more judges is to be appointed after the competition has opened for entries, then the onus will be on the prospective judge to review the names of all entrants and either confirm that no conflicts of interest exist or withdraw from the appointment (this would be fairer than disqualifying a candidate who entered a competition in good faith at an earlier juncture when the name of a particular judge had not been announced).
The jury members are competing with each other as if it is a team sport. Boxing is a corrupt sport, but not this bad.
There are problems with having international viola competitions. Most people think it’s just a BIG violin. It’s only going to get worse………
Like the 2016 conducting competiton held in Wroclaw. The jury was forced by the adjudicator to swap third and fourth place because of political reasons. In the first round the jury was told in a threatening tone that there were not enough Polish competitors in the final. It made the newspapers at the time.
PS: it was “Towards Polyphony”.
Maybe the idea is to appoint judges who will get their best students to compete. How many entrants were there? Where many entrants not students of the judges? As presented, the conclusion is drawn is unsupported.
I don’t think this was a viola competition. However his Strad is a very large pattern.
Like the 2016 conducting Towards Polyphony competiton held in Wroclaw. The jury was forced by the adjudicator to swap third and fourth place because of political reasons. In the first round the jury was told in a threatening tone that there were not enough Polish competitors in the final. It made the newspapers at the time.
Le Rhuematologue…ou le Compositeur ?
Ils peuvent tous les deux être douloureux !
I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Swedish.
After consulting various websites, it seems that the 5th International Karol Lipinski Violin Competition took place in 2019. Now in 2023, we have the 1st Karol Lipinski International Violin Competition. Go figure…
No music competition worth its salt would have as a judge a teacher of one of its competitors. It is not complicated to wait on naming a jury until after the competitors are identified.
What is a music competition in the first place? At best they are just a mechanism to give instrumentalists a platform to perform as most likely those who enter competitions needs better platform to perfect their trade craft. It is Not a platform to determine who is better or who is not as its not like a horse race where there is a clear measure of what a winner looks like. So who cares if the students are all competing against each other. If you take competition seriously, you are part of the problem in the competition circuit.
It seems that the Lipiński Competition was discontinued during covid, and has now been rebooted, so they’re calling it the first instead of the sixth.
My piano teacher, Graciella Kowalczyk, started a Chopin piano competition in Nashville, Tennessee, which had its first year back in October. I enjoyed watching the competition, as students of judges were not allowed to compete. I think all competitions should have this rule!
But the Jury has friends. I give a prize to your pupils, you invite me to your competition or the master classes, or my pupils win your competition. Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Us., everywhere has been like this for years
And to add to the feast, the third prize winner got her name announced for second round list without playing the first round…. Emmmmmm
Possibly, there may even have been jurors who didn’t accept the final verdict; they will definitely not be asked back!
But let’s be clear, interesting players will tend to shine through, eventually – even if the wedge is thinning.
Every Competition is like this. Even I knew the competition, where the organizer changed the results of the jury.