The winner of the first International Harp Competition and Festival, the Netherlands, is -
Noël Wan (photo: Nike Martens).
Second prize: Rino Kageyama
Third prize: Eleanor Turner
Peutz audience prize: Eleanor TurnerPrize for the best performance of the set contemporary piece, Forgotten Lore by Henk Alkema: Noël Wan
Schumann accompaniment prize: Christoph Bielefeld
Congratulations to them all!
Congratulations also to Remy van Kesteren and his team. As it was said in the speeches at the end of the final, this competition and festival may have been organised by students, but they were absolutely professional in what they conceived and how they organised it.
Maybe talented students are among the best types of people to organise a competition. Remy has been to and done well in enough harp competitions himself recently: what works well in competitions, and what is frustrating, off-putting or simply corrupt is fresh in students' minds. Unless you are actually doing competitions (or have a lot of experience preparing students for them and regularly sit on juries), it is so easy to forget what the experience is really like.
Doing any international competition is intense and very tough. Months or years of preparation and enormous stress are involved, and even if you are an exceptional harpist, there is no guarantee you will win. An athlete wins a race if he crosses the line first, but a musician only wins a competition if his performance corresponds to the artistic perceptions of a human jury. If you lament that it is "not fair" you didn't win, you are only describing what you embarked on in the first place: all music competitions are fundamentally "unfair", because nobody's individual opinion can be "fair". We couch our praise in win/lose terms, like a race, but what we are actually doing is congratulating an artist on a superb achievement. Fortunately, music is loved and served by enough superbly talented people for many competitors to deserve such praise.
That we nonetheless so often use the win/lose structure of a competition to celebrate talent can be confusing, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable - if it wasn't, there wouldn't be so many competitions. You just have to make sure you aren't confused by it, but rather understand what it is you are really there to do. There is no more effective way to push yourself to play better than you ever have before, no better training for your nerves. Competitions are wonderful ways to meet new colleagues who will become your lifelong friends, to hear different levels and styles of playing, to open doors to new musical worlds, and to worlds within yourself. There is also no greater elation than when you win - it is after all, OK to reward hard work and great talent. On a philosophical level, you can never ultimately define who was the best of all, but in reality some harpists are certainly better than others, and constant striving to play better is part of a musician's raison d'etre. That is why we cry "bravo!" at the end of a marvelous concert, for the musician's achievement. The difficulty and effort involved is as ennobling as the music itself.
If you're going to put yourself through it all, you need to understand that these are the real prizes when you go to a competition. Go because you want to be "the best", or because you think one competition win will make your career for you, and all you will be is disappointed - even if you win. Go as a means to larger ends and you should rarely regret having done it, even if you lose. The organisers of this first competition and festival in Utrecht know this, or they would not have focused so heavily on making the event a productive learning experience for all candidates - and for those who could not be there in person, thanks to the online live streaming of the last two rounds. It was a positive, inspiring week in music, I hope as much for all candidates, as for those of us lucky enough to be looking on.
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