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This has been somewhat discussed over on Google Groups (RMCR), but the Chopin Competition did release (a couple of days ago) the scores and ratings of each of the competitors by each judge in each round of the competition. If we look at the final round, we see that each juror could rate each of the finalists on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest, i.e., first prize). Of all the finalists, Katie got the largest number (3) of 10's (first place votes), but she only got third prize.
So what happened? It turned out that a couple of the jurors rated her very low - two jurors in particular: Akiko Ebi from Japan, and MARTHA ARGERICH from Argentina (now Switzerland). I hate to say it, Martha, but you really blew it on this one! Any more decisions like this and folks are going to take away your "Tigress" credentials! ;-)
Seriously though, it's very interesting seeing what a wide divergence there was among the jury members with the different competitors. It reinforces what that British critic that they interviewed said: why shouldn't critics disagree with the judges decisions? After all, the judges can't even agree among themselves! ;-)
Follow Ups:
I was wondering what would have happened if instead of adding up for the total of 17 Juror's marks, the highest and the lowest marks were not considered thus it becomes a total of 15 Jurors. Doing some summing up I get the following marks.
Seong Cho 143-11= 132
CR Hamelin 138-16= 122
Katie Liu Assuming as a best case that Juror TD marks his students equally when each s works out to a maximum of 8 since the total by one Juror cannot exceed 55
128-13= 115
The above clearly shows the first 3 positions.
Now assuming that MA gives KL a maximum of 10, KL's marks works out to
115+(10-4)= 121 < 122
Cheers Chris
Bill
Head to head, the winner beat Kate 10 jurors to 6.
Looks like the winner won to me.
This is a well known problem in analytics algorithms, find the total ordering which results in the fewest number of individual ranking mismatches.
. . . even though I don't agree with the actual scores of some judges! ;-)
If I heard the performances, my opinion would likely differ from all the others..... We all listen for different things.
Interesting Martha Argerich was one of the judges.... I think judges who were musicians listen for what they do personally in performance.... I've never liked Argerich's style of playing. And if she preferred performances similar to how she performed personally, I can imagine the disagreement between her choices and how others judged them.
I'm not sure that established performing musicians really do "listen for what they do personally in performance." Do you have any evidence to support that idea?
As I brought up below, all of the established performing musicians (Alexeev, Argerich, Entremont, Goerner, Ohlsson, Yundi) and respected interpreters of Chopin, were pretty much in agreement on Cho and Richard-Hamelin being the two top contestants. They have different styles of play, different interpretations of Chopin.
Yet, my question still remains? Do highly successful performing artists, who have a long career on stage, score differently from pedagogues and critics?
If they do, is it because they are listening for contestants who play the mus ic the way they themselves would play it, as you suggest? (Hard to imagine, since they all play so differently.) Or is there something else that they perceive?
It's sort of the in thing to diss Argerich, but she was not alone on that panel. The rest of the successful performing musicians preferred the performances of Cho and R-H. The one outlier among this group was Entremont, and it is a mystery what prompted him to score Cho a 1 in that final round. It might have been a mistake. Maybe he meant 10 and the 0 got lost or something. Who knows.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
. . . with the exception of Ebi's absurdly high score (8) for Yang. A couple of the other judges were also very close to Argerich in their scores, but not quite as singularly close as Ebi was.
Also, I notice that (4) was the lowest score that Argerich gave, which she gave to four different competitors (including Kate Liu). I still think her (and Ebi's) scoring of Kate Liu in that last round was insane. ;-)
We get it. You liked Liu's performance. You also liked Lu's performance. Which is fine. You disagreed with the judges. That's fine too.
I haven't yet listened to any of the performances, so I don't know where I would land, if I were scoring myself.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
When Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky competition S. Richter was a judge. Hegave Van a 10 and nothing to anybody else. They told him he had to rank the performers. He refused and was never asked back to judge. He simply felt there was no real competition for Van Cliburn
Alan
And, frankly, I don't agree with that kind of behavior, which attempts to minimize the impact of the input from the other judges (who are trying to play the game more fairly). (BTW, I think I heard that story with Gilels mentioned instead of Richter? - I could well be mistaken however.)
"I'd NEVER do something like that!"
Say, compared to Richter.
At that moment Richter thought he was. Van never really developed his career. Small repertoire and he really burned out pretty early. I think he had so much fame so early and made so much money that he never worked hard enough to have a long concert career
Alan
Take two Polonaise and get plenty of rest :)
nt
Once again, sorry!
Honestly, I haven't had time to listen to the competition at all. But I just looked at the scoring records (thanks for the link).
Looks to me like Ms Liu didn't win because she didn't get high enough scores from enough of the judges. You can single out Martha Argerich if you like, but 6 other judges scored her below at 7 or lower. That's not a glowing endorsement from the panel.
In comparison, Mr Cho scored 9s and 10s from all but one judge, and Mr Richard-Hamelin scored 8-10 on most cards. The panel as a whole seemed pretty much in agreement that these were the two best performers in that round. That seems like consensus to me.
I hope I'll be able to listen to some of these performances, if my personal schedule lightens up.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
Yes, a lot of interesting results if you're a statistician. Mr. Cho would have completely dominated the scoring but for the 1 from Philippe Entremont. Oddly, he is the only contestant for whom Entremont significantly disagrees with Martha Argerich. I like that kind of violent disagreement, it may result from some interesting playing. So he is worth checking out.
But even without formal statistical analysis, a glance at the numbers does reveal a surprising amount of consensus, and I have to agree with you regarding the placement of the top three.
But Martha was definitely ONE of the culprits! ;-)In any case, as I stated, Cho was certainly deserving of his prize in portraying the more virile side of the composer. And, as I also mentioned, Madeline called it correctly (i.e., predicting that Cho would be the winner). OTOH, Richard-Hamelin had a bit of the freight train in his concerto playing IMHO. ;-)
I would have ranked the top three as follows:
The others were significantly below these three - again just IMHO.
- Kate Liu
- Eric Lu
- Seong-Jin Cho
BTW, did you notice how low Philippe Entremont ranked Cho (i.e., last of the final 10!) - something in Cho's playing must really have offended him. And I think Entremont's low rankings for Cho were consistent in the previous two rounds too. LOL!
EDIT: I forgot to mention that Martha didn't even vote for Katie to advance beyond the first round (!), although she apparently changed her mind and voted to advance Katie in the second and third rounds. The whole process among the individual judges is very interesting to examine now.
Edits: 10/27/15
I tend to look more closely at the scoring of the highly successful performing artists on the panel. The "been there, done that" group who have built careers on stage and in the studio. The reason, maybe misguided on my part, is because there is more to great performance than hitting all the notes. And sustaining a career as a very successful performing artist is really hard, physically and mentally. So these people have earned my respect.The ones I'm familiar with would be Alexeev, Argerich, Goerner, Entremont, Ohlsson, and Yundi (Li). I've heard all of these people play Chopin (and much more of course) in concert or broadcast recording as well as studio recordings. I'm also familiar with some recordings of Ebi, Yoffe and Jasinski, although they are less established as performing artists.
These musicians mostly preferred the performances of Cho and R-H over all the other contestants.
Do highly successful performing artists grade differently from pedagogues and judges with less established performing careers? This is just a question. I've never really thought about it before.
As for Entremont, wow! What was his problem with Cho? Everyone else was so very impressed with Cho. (Of course, of the panel judges who are highly successful performing pianists, Entremont would be at the bottom of my list. But still, WTF?)
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
Edits: 10/27/15
"Do highly successful performing artists grade differently from pedagogues and judges with less established performing careers?"
Yes, their success is likely due to a superior perspective of what brings out the best in music. Having said that, performers can certainly be as biased as anyone else.
Dave
I certainly think he was more successful than Ebi, Yoffe and Jasinski - maybe Goerner too.
I very much agree with your comment about jurors' backgrounds. NY Times music critic Harold Schonberg was a friend of my father's and I got to meet and chat with him as well. A great journalist and writer (his coverage of the Fischer v. Spassky world chess championship in 1972 helped it become a legendary event, though he was no chess expert), with a near photographic memory and encyclopedic knowledge of classical music history, and also a middling amateur pianist.
He served on the jury at some major piano competitions, and I thought that was ridiculous. A restaurant critic may know what food he likes, and/or what food most of his readers will probably like, but he won't be as good a judge of who has was it takes to become a great chef as a current great chef would be. You have to know what goes on in the kitchen.
C'mon - editors/musicologists are so entrenched in the universities, what value do they they add (and what experience can they bring) to such a practical endeavor as picking a single competitor for the launch of an actual career as a performing musician?Having said that however, I feel that Rink's actual scoring in the final round was pretty competent (aside from his low ranking of Eric Lu), and I especially applaud his ranking of Yike (Tony) Yang in last place among the ten finalists. What were the other jurors thinking to rank Yang so high?
Edits: 10/28/15
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