Brant Piano Competition, at Birmingham Town Hall

Jun 29 2009 By Christopher Morley

Brant Piano Competition, at Birmingham Town Hall

The Brant International Pianoforte Competition has had a long, proud history over several decades during which it located itself over many venues in Birmingham.

Now, comfortably settled in Birmingham’s gracious Town Hall, it desperately needs to rethink itself or risk collapsing. There were scarcely more than the proverbial three men and a dog at Saturday’s final, and all three performers were survivors from a very small trawl of initial applicants.

I would suggest the competition be renamed - I’m sure “the Birmingham International Piano Competition” (perhaps allied to the equally prestigious Dudley competition) would be more of an attraction - and with a pool of applicants worldwide instead of those taught within the limitations of these shores’ conservatoires.

It would also help if the jury were more open. Performances on Saturday were frankly dull, until the young Russian Alexander Karpeyev enlivened proceedings with an epic programme, strictly within time-limits, of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, Britten’s Notturno, and three scenes from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, scintillatingly delivered.

Yet this charismatic young man was placed last of the three, after first prize-winner Alexei Petrov (Scriabin, Brahms and the unfailingly crowd-pleasing Prokofiev Sonata no. 7) and Tatiana Dardykina, her Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov workmanlike, but making little lasting impression.

Thankfully, after recent years notorious for the judges’ prolixity in decision-making time, we didn’t have to wait too long for the result, but it came as a huge surprise to the majority of musicians within this tiny audience.

We were given no reasons, sound though they might have been in the judges’ own minds, for this controversial decision: so we wonder even more, what is the point of such an event, if illumination is not forthcoming?