The Chopin Competition and accusations of corruption

I've not had time to follow the Chopin Competition at all closely, but I note a lot of accusations of corruption regarding the final result. I find this unsurprising - not because I think the accusations are justified, but because it happens pretty much every time. Here are some observations from having sat on international competition juries.

- I've never seen any hint or attempt at impropriety among jury members, but every jury I have sat on has been accused of some kind of fix. Competitions now tend to take great efforts to avoid the possibility of corruption so the accusation should not be made without credible evidence. “I don’t like the result” is not credible evidence. Read on if you are already mentally protesting. I feel your pain!

- The question of competitors having studied with jury members is not very significant in my opinion as long as the voting rules guard against such bias. How would a jury member influence the result when they can't vote for their student? They would have to try to influence several of their colleagues which would almost certainly be reported to the chair of the jury or the competition administrator or both. This is only likely to damage the chances of the competitor in question.

- Here is the crux of the issue, I think: it is often bewildering and horrifying to discover the opinions of one's fellow jurors (once you’re allowed to discuss), especially those whose musicianship you love and whose judgement you assume you could trust. That has taught me a huge lesson - one's visceral reaction, which can feel so self-evidently 'right', cannot in any way be assumed to be right; it's just a more or less informed opinion. Very hard to accept! But it explains seemingly puzzling competition results. I suspect if we were to dig into it, we'd discover jurors are listening for very different things. For me, rhythmic characterisation and structure are maybe the dominant things I latch onto. For someone else it might be colour, or imagination, or humility, or extroversion, or fidelity to the score etc etc etc. Who is to say which of us has the better approach? Once I told a jury colleague that a performance of La Campanella had been a privilege to hear; he replied "It was a disgrace"! He had objected to the tempo not increasing as Liszt marks - for him that was damning. I just loved the pianism and colour. Multiply this disagreement by how many jurors there are, and it leads to the familiar observation that the most efficient, least controversial candidate often wins by virtue of attracting the least negative reactions from the jury, rather than the most positive.

In the end, accusations of corruption are really saying “It’s not possible the jury members honestly had a different opinion from me”. I think that makes the absurdity of this knee-jerk reaction clear.