The verdict following the semi-finals of the Montreal International Musical Competition, Saturday and Sunday at Bourgie Hall, designated four men and two women, who will compete for victory Wednesday and Thursday at Maison symphonique with the OSM under the direction of Rafael Payare. For a very rare time, the six concertos heard will be different.
Two Koreans, SooBeen Lee, 22, a student of Miriam Fried in Boston, and SongHa Choi, 23, a disciple of Kolja Blacher in Berlin, will face four male candidates from Ukraine and Kazakhstan on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. , the United States and Israel. Lee chose the Violin Concerto by Tchaikovsky and Choi the 2e by Prokofiev.
The additional orchestral rehearsal allocated this year to the preparation of the evenings of the final is timely, because it is – something unusual – six different concertos that we will hear. For those who consider that competitions have trouble attracting audiences to the hall because they don’t want to listen to Tchaikovsky twice and Sibelius three times in two evenings, the test will be perfect: an anthology of concertos for violin by selected and motivated young people, with the OSM directed by Rafael Payare, the line-up could not be more enticing.
Rematch
Dmytro Udovychenko will open the ball with the Concerto noh 1 by Shostakovich. The 23-year-old Ukrainian, a pupil of the great pedagogue Boris Garlitsky, is in the process of perfecting himself with Christian Tetzlaff. American Nathan Meltzer, 22, a student of Itzhak Perlman, will play the Concerto in memory of an angel de Berg, perpetuating an emerging trend of the last ten years in the competitions: to distinguish oneself by a “profound” concerto rather than a supposedly virtuoso one. This strategy brought luck to pianists Jayson Gillham in 2014 with the 4e Concerto by Beethoven and Zoltán Fejérvári in 2017 with the 3e Concerto by Bartok.
This type of risk-taking was formerly non-existent because, with the limited preparation time with an orchestra, the candidates avoided complex works in favor of the expected concertos supposed to “roll on their own”. For the record, Meltzer and Udovychenko met exactly a year ago in the final of the Sibelius Competition. The American had finished 2e and Ukrainian 3e of a competition then won by the Korean Inmo Yang.
Very serious candidate, the Israeli Michael Shaham, 19, studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Shmuel Ashkenasi and Ida Kavafian. Looking at the semi-final on the Internet, he stands out for the sound he gets from his 1714 Milanese Santino Lavazza violin. He will play the Concerto by Sibelius.
Last candidate in the running, to close Thursday evening in the 1er Concerto of Paganini, Ruslan Talas, 24, who competes for Kazakhstan, but was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He studied at the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne with Janine Jansen and won the Lipizer Prize in 2022.
Overall, even before the final, the Violin 2023 edition has avoided the fatality of being plagued by what we call “professional candidates”, those who roam the competitions, but will never shine as soloists or will never be ambassadors of competitions that crowned them.
Even if Udovychenko, Meltzer and Talas are already experienced in this kind of test, they do not appear to be repeat offenders, and all the finalists are between 19 and 24 years old, a perfect time to hatch. We are far from the profile of Mme Pichlmair, 2e Prix in 2019, who, at age 29, had come to make some pocket money and perfect her CV in Montreal, while she earned her living professionally by playing in the ranks of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. She has since joined the Berlin Philharmonic. So much the better for her, but that’s not the spirit of a competition like the one in Montreal, nor the sense of commitment of its many volunteers. That, at least, is preserved this year.