January 2008

As somewhat of a competition junkie, I find this absolutely fascinating. It's a comprehensive report on the 3rd Sendai International Music Competition, which ran from May to June last year and covered two disciplines, violin and piano.

To be fair, most of it—the photos, the juror's comments, and the results overview—although pretty and nicely formatted, is pretty blasé. What piques my interest, however, is the section labeled Data, and in particular, the two subsections labeled Number of Participations and Results.

Number of Participations is a review of how many applicants from each country in each of the competition's two disciplines reached each stage of the competition. You can tell, for example, that 100 of 131 (76%) applicants were accepted into the violin competition, 87 of whom would go on to perform a screening audition.

Results is a detailed view of the results. How detailed? Well, it's detailed to the point that you can observe each individual mark awarded to each semifinalist by the individual jurors, sorted by highest to lowest (which jurors awarded which marks, of course, remains unknown). Not only that, but the results from each stage of voting for the placements are also given. In the piano competition, for example, you can see that Yuya Tsuda of Japan was declared the winner after receiving eight of eleven first-place votes.

Even more observations can be made:

you can tell exactly which competitors had teachers on the jury; they're the ones who only have ten marks awarded.
the competition seems to have reversed its decision to remove all traces of Shorena Tsintsabadze, who was arrested prior to her semifinal performance and subsequently disqualified, from its website.
very few applicants performed their screening audition at Shanghai and Moscow, but almost everybody who did was selected.
pianists give higher marks than violinists. :-)

Now, if they could just repost those competition videos they had up until September…

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Mark O'Connor's method books -- released this week -- teach students using many styles of American music. Enter to win a set of the books this week, on Violinist.com. Photo: Deanna Rose