Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner 2009 Van Cliburn Competition Megathread

That reasoning doesn't seem lame to me. The best teachers would tend to have the best students, so if no juror was alllowed to have a student in the competition it could hurt the quality of the jury or be incredibly unfair to potential contestants(by not allowing them to participate).

How many competitions don't allow judges to have their students in the competition? Do any of the biggest competitions have this rule?

An alternate juror could be made available! The world (outside the US) is full of accomplished artists and teachers!

How would that solve any of the problems?

Teachers could still lower their vote for contestants that weren't their students, although I would, perhaps naively, that not many on the jury do this. Also, just because the juror was from outside the US wouldn't mean he/she had no pupils in the contest.

Teh idea would be not to have jurors judging their own students. This is kind of preposterous, if nothing else, for PR reasons.
AS far as lowering the grades of the other contestants, for one i like to beliebve that the distinguished jury folks are professional . For two, I think the probablitiy of succeeding in pushing their own by lowering other competitors' assessments is low, and may be too transparent for their colleagues..

i'm not sure when the jury is selected (I assume that the competition jury may not be the same as the one that selects the 30 contestants to begin with). Once the 30 contestants have been chosen, then you can select the competition jury being careful to avoid teachers of the 30 contestants. That shouldn't be too hard...

I believe each juror's scores are normalized both for mean (so that giving all scores between 1-5 has the same effect as 21-25) and standard deviation (so a juror who gives a wider range of scores doesn't have more influence than one who gives a narrower one).

Is it possible to game the system? Perhaps, but not without being so obvious about it that it would cause a scandal.

Didn't an earlier poster say that in the Cliburn a judge is not allowed to vote if one of their students is performing? Also, the idea of a judge purposely lowering his vote if the contestant was not his student was suggested by another poster, not me.

The paring down of the contestants to the 30 in Texas only occurs around 3 or 4 montns before the competition. So it wouldn't be possible to select a jury after that whittling down process.

Book them ahead of time!

why not? I would think 3 months is more than enough time, or am I missing something?

maybe, we should have a new scoring system like figure skating's, which will force the jury to judge on more detailed level and give the reason to score.

nothing will be totally fair however with any judging system or jurors, because it always has subjectivity involved unless it can be minimized.

The jury is selected WAY in advance and can't vote on their own students (that doesn't prevent others for advocating for them, however).

The biggest problem that I see is that most major international competitions have the same jurors - Pressler, Kaplinsky, Richard Dyer, Kalichstein, John O'Connor, Hiroko Nakamura, Zhou Guangren, John Giordano, Zhou Guangren, Arie Vardi, etc. It's particularly an issue with the Cliburn, IMO. Most of the same jurors come back each time.

double

They have to be booked ahead of time, and that's precisely why it would be impossible to guarantee that no teacher has a student in the competition. You're not suggesting that a competition disallow a juror who teaches any of the 100+ competitors who start out are you??

You really think the people on the jury don't plan their schedules more than three months in advance?

I'm a small time nobody, and my schedule is booked at least 6 months in advance. I would not be surprised if Kaplinsky's schedule is booked 3-5 years out.

another option is to group jury pool by competitions, especially for major ones. that is for each major competition, we assign a group of potential jury, which is excluded from other jury groups for other competitions (maybe during a time span, say 5 year range). that way, the jury of each competition can only vote for this competition but not the others, which will eliminate the same jury for all the competitions.

I'm impressed by the lively and diverse performances so far. Can't pick a winner--to me, they're all good. Are the jurors inclined to score higher if they like the pieces they hear, and not necessarily the performance thereof? Maybe that's why you hear so many "usual suspects."

I love Andrea Lam's program the most. I'm not familiar with those Goyescas, but they really give the performer a chance to show musicality.

And then Zhang Haochen just blew me away. What was I doing when I was 19?

I made a separate thread about the Chopin Rondo Op.5 but copied it below because I thought more people might read it here and it's also relevant to this thread:

I just heard this piece for the first time played by Bozhamov. I was amazed at how terrific a piece I thought it was, and wondered why it is to my knowledge not performed more often. Anyone have experience playing or hearing this work performed? Why do you think it is so rarely performed?

Here is a youtube recording(not as good as the VC performance IMHO):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PesThjPQdR0&feature=related

And the IMSLP socre:
http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/1/19/IMSLP00486-Chopin_-_Rondo_a_la_Mazur__Op_5.pdf

thanks for posting this piece, and i'm interested. Bozhanov is really an artist pianist, and i really love his playing, basically everything he did, and definitely will watch his performance video again, and probably just follow this score.