Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition
This month (November 2019), the international Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition took place in Paris (France).
After the announcement of the results, many people reacted quite strongly and there were also some incorrect publications suggesting some kind of "complot" or conspiracy.
From the moment the Alink-Argerich Foundation was created, 20 years ago, it has always been an important characteristic of AAF to be independent and objective.
In view of all the mixed reactions, we feel obliged to make a statement here with some facts about the 2019 Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition:
- Martha Argerich joined the jury only for the final stage with orchestra;
- in 2015, Kenji Miura had indeed received the AAF Award. This was at the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition, where Martha Argerich had also been on the jury. However, at that time, the decision to give the AAF Award to Kenji Miura was not made by Martha Argerich nor by Gustav nor by AAF. Before the competition in Hamamatsu started, it had been agreed between AAF and the competition organisers (and also published as such) that the AAF Award would go to the pianist among the semi-finalists who ranked nr.7 and who would therefore have just not reached the finals. (Also in the 2016 edition of the annual AAF catalogue, this has been reported precisely how it was. See page 67 in the PDF version of this catalogue:
https://www.alink-argerich.org/books/detail/id/22)
- the fact that Kenji Miura had been recipient of the AAF Award in 2015 had no influence whatsoever on Martha Argerich's judgment of his performance in the final stage with orchestra at the 2019 Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition. (This became immediately clear in a talk with Martha right after the results: Martha had not even realised that Kenji had received the AAF Award in Hamamatsu. In fact, she did not remember it, and had even forgotten that she heard him in Hamamatsu. The positive thing about this is that Martha was unbiased in her judgment of his performance in Paris.)
- during the Award ceremony, it was announced that Kenji Miura also received a special prize by the Argerich Foundation. This concerned the Argerich Foundation in Beppu (Japan), which is not to be confused with the Alink-Argerich Foundation;
- by no means, AAF would ever try to have any influence on the jury's decisions. To the contrary, we do everything we can to help making the competitions fair and transparent and to improve them. For this reason, AAF organised an international conference in Barcelona, 2018, and will do so again in Utrecht, 2020. Our feeling and support always goes to all the contestants. We are happy for the winners and we feel sorry for all those other pianists who also perform excellently and who are wonderful musicians. Naturally, we may also have our own musical preferences when we hear the performances at competitions, but we would never talk or suggest anything to the jury or to the organisers about the participants during the course of the competition;
- it is fully understandable that there is a lot of excitement at competitions. It can also be seen at other competitions that people sometimes react too negatively and accuse the organisers or the jury of making unfair decisions. Taken by these emotions, some people start to say or write things which may look extraordinary or sound shocking, but which are not true or lack realistic view and proper reasoning. In our experience at competitions, we have seen many times that the jury members are sincere and try their best to give good evaluations and to arrive at balanced results (which are often based on the pianists' performances throughout the competition, not only in the finals).
Concours Long Thibaud Crespin
La Lettre du Musicien
www.alink-argerich.org