Leeds picks a winner. It’s a boy
NewsHaving rigged the finals to contrive a fairer gender balance, the Leeds Piano Competition was won tonight by a 24 year-old Canadian male.
Jaeden Izik-Dzurko, 24, triumphed with a performance of Brahms’s second piano concerto. He takes home £30,000 and a sheaf of orchestral engagements.
Jury chair Dame Imgoen Cooper said: ‘Our aim was to find not just the finest pianist, but the most complete musician, and with Jaeden we have achieved that. He demonstrated exceptional artistic maturity and imagination, remarkable technical command, and a profound ability to captivate and transport the audience through his storytelling and poetry throughout the Competition, culminating in a truly unforgettable final performance. We wish him, and all of the competitors, every success in the future, and have no doubt we will hear from many of them again.’
Canada. Again. They’re just blitzing music competitions and good on them. Congratulations Jaeden.
Oh you poor alt-right panicking joke 🙂 hope you watched how the two women from the podium you weren’t kind enough to mention were making a laughingstock of you 🙂
To whom is this addressed? Does it allude to some secret that is being kept from the rest of bus?
Good heavens, i never realose that the Leeds competition was held in a bus! Certainly the BUSoni……!
Take a guess, Paul! You can do it!
I’m most amused watching 20+ thumbs down under my comment, lots of boys still feeling unsecured. At least you have each other 🙂
They did not rig the final. There was a clause about gender concerned with advancing through the rounds. I don’t agree with the clause, but yet again Slipped Disc stirs the pot. Also you misquote Dame Imogen Cooper as she did not address those comments to the winner. She said that’s what they were looking for and then she read out the full results which is subtly different from the way you reported it. If the finals was rigged at all, your sensationalist reporting probably helped ensure that a female winner wasn’t possible as everyone would have claimed it rigged. You knew exactly what you were doing by releasing your article when you did, and now your being triumphant in showing how despite the rigging the man won. So you’ve shown yourself as someone who clearly wanted to make mischief and ensure one of the ladies couldn’t win. Junyan Chen was outstanding and she will flourish.
“You knew exactly what you were doing by releasing your article when you did”
How do you know he “knew exactly what..[he]..was doing”?
Is this not mere surmise and invention masquerading as infallible knowledge?
Never forgotten how a few years ago, NL published the workplace details of someone whose comments had annoyed him, when that person had signed themselves as ‘guest’. The website claims that it doesn’t make emails or personal details public. Some of the ‘mischief-making’ on this site is indeed, pretty low.
Do you really think the articles and comments posted on this website are being considered by the judges at elite competitions?!
I was thinking kind of the same, cause we all felt it was going to be decided basically between them two, Junyan and Jaeden. But on the other hand: such narrow-minded panicking boys like our alt-right host are same unimporant as they are loud. Just ignore it, have a laugh. We could all hear Khanh Nhi Luong, we could all hear Junyan Chen. The opportunities for them will come.
Funny how everyone in the chat wanted Junyan to win instead. 🙂
It needs him as much as he needs it.
Predictable, really.
Too bad about McLachlan and Ushida: both interesting. Chen has lost her glamour. Scruffy Trevelyan needs a haircut and clothes.
The men dress very badly these days.Time for a return to traditional concertwear.
Trevelyan hobbled himself by choosing Bartok’s feeble third concerto, he’s a worthwhile musician, unlike the adolescent McLachlan.
In your day there was also Friedrich Gulda, and in my day I do not know of any touring soloists who dress like Gulda
I listened to his semifinal and Brahms Concerto and cannot understand how he can win with this sterile and bureaucratic performances ?
Well, he is Canadian, and they are a nation of bores (Ehnes, Hewitt….need one say more?).
Vickers . . . Gould . . .
Jaeden doesn’t know how to lose competitions – he’s won virtually every competition he’s ever entered. So, if you found his approach to be middle of the road, therein lies his secret.
Cruel but not unfair.
Congratulations to Jaeden Izik-Dzurko!
Safe piano plonker he is; individual, exceptional artist he is not. His playing is so characteristically bland it doesn’t offend anyone, yet excites no one.
The most interesting artist in the entire competition was Ushida. Perhaps Imogen Cooper wanted him eliminated because she saw him as a threat to her own career coincidentally also marketed around Schubert.
That’s very unfair, she’s not that kind of person at all.
I predicted Izik- Dzurko as the winner on a previous post. I feel vindicated- following a reply post by a ghastly individual who claimed that I was a fool to do so. Norman did the right thing & deleted their obnoxious post.
Well, if you were in Bradford last night, everyone will have their own opinion of who should have won, but they are all winners. Peter Donohoe is a classic example of a fine career and coming sixth many years ago.
Yes, the ghastly poster was marked as mortimerfying.
Sadly, as it managed to make national news, the thing that the general public are most likely to remember about this particular competition, is the idiocy of its gender policy.
I bet the organizers won’t let THAT happen again.
I was there for both nights at the finals, and he was spectacular along with the woman from China who played Rachmaninov 4, and who I thought might win it but came second. Still a great thing to happen. Wish all the competitors, now winners, wonderful careers. They were all exceptional and no one should fault them.
Some real poetry in the Rachmaninov but a complete lack of rhythmic grip.
Bearing in mind the fact that this competition was generously and thoughtfully established by THREE WOMEN (Dame Fanny Waterman, the Countess of Harewood & Roslyn Lyons) in 1961, the tone of the commentary by some men, over the last few days, comes across as spiteful, entitled and wilfully ignorant of the realities of gender inequity.
Since 19 out of 21 winners have been male – in this competition founded by three enlightened females – one wonders whether the LIPC should simply host a women-only edition next time around – just for the fun of it…
It only shows that the THREE WOMEN weren’t sexist so they didn’t think of those rules when establishing it instead letting meritocracy sort things out. And by the way, with more women now in classical music than men that rule potentially over time will in fact help men that don’t deserve to go to next rounds. You just use “equity” and other buzzwords du jour as long as it’s convenient.
To be fair there have been two female winners since 2009 and last night could easily have made it three.
The jury rules (as I read them) a disgrace..patronising and dictatorial in equal measure. Were I asked to serve on such a jury (fat chance) then I’d refuse. But Norman, dear Norman Jaeden is far from being a ‘boy’. That’s about as loaded as it can get. He deserves his great success (though not my choice) and you have no right to demean him.
Yes- John- weren’t you once on the Dudley Competition- I sent you a video & was admitted to the first round many years ago.
Bravo! (but I can’t remember of course under what name you applied).
Yes fat chance indeed, dear John. It would be less of a fat chance if you had actually accomplished something in your so called musical life.
And please don’t get started on how prestigious Dudley is. The sad thing is no one in the real world cares or even knows what it is.
Rather an absurd comment about rigging, though there is almost everything to criticise about the selection of the largely unsuitable and unqualified jurists. No pianists of outstanding ability this year, though not disgraceful.
The beginning of the end of the Leeds International piano competition.
Quota based gender selection is just the start. It will now be open season for the alphabet people and of course the race baiters.
Oh for the days when it was simply a piano competition.
and a very sweet one too.
Someone needs to work on his platform deportment though and get him to smile a bit more when taking applause.
He obviously has a nice smile as seen on this photo, but there was little evidence of it at the final..
Good luck to his future work!