Star violinist: ‘I am very much against competitions’

Martin Malmgren says:

That’s precisely the point with competitions, for me. What us youngsters often lack is stage experience, and competitions offer us an opportunity to grow on stage. Also, just as you say, it gives us the opportunity to meet other musicians, share experiences, and learn from one another. I’ve made great friends in competitions, and have also enjoyed preparing for the same competitions with fellow pianists – always supporting one another, and understanding that ultimately we are not ‘competing against each others’ (which is what Rachlin brings up) but we are growing, each and every one of us, in different ways and directions. I grew with each competition I prepared for, if I prepared well. The result was always less important. But I also had the opportunity of doing things I could never dream of without competitions – earlier this year I got the chance to play Prokofiev’s 5th concerto in the finals of a competition (there were several odd-ball concerti in the finals), a piece that I’ll be playing three more times in the nearest future.

The usual pitfall with competitions is that since they are all so similarly structured, they tend to lead to performers narrowing rather than widening their repertoire (playing ‘safe pieces’ that ‘work well’ in competitions, etc etc). However, I believe that mustn’t necessarily happen, and if it does, perhaps in the end it says more about a particular performer than what it says about a particular competition. We like to blame competitions for creating boring perfectionist performers, and somehow we seem to forget that those ‘boring performers’ are all willing participants in this game – if they are uninteresting to listen to, do they have anyone but themselves to blame?

I remember a pianist who for some unknown reason fared well in a bunch of regional (non-international) competitions, always repeating exactly the same pieces with basically zero wrong notes and zero passion for the music. He would practice those pieces ten, twelve hours per day, endlessly, same passages over and over, like a type-writer. He had zero interest for exploring repertoire beyond standard works. The guy had never even played a Chopin mazurka in his life! He played some large-scale Chopin works, because that’s good competition material – mazurkas aren’t. Yet he managed winning a couple of competitions. Never would I say that ‘competitions are to blame’ for ‘creating boring musicians’ – boring musicians have themselves to blame. And if competitions would suddenly vanish, they would still be the same uninteresting musicians, I believe.