COMpetitions

Top
Competitors 5Lessons Learned
from Winning and Losing
Beatrice Rana
24, piano
Winner, Montreal International Piano Competition, 2011
Silver Medalist, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, 2013
Professional pianist
Thanks largely to her Cliburn win, Beatrice Rana is a busy international soloist,
currently gracing major stages in London, Paris, Berlin, and her home base
of Rome.
“Life changing” is how she describes the impact of winning the Silver
Medal that came with a $20,000 award. “After the announcement of the prizes,
the next day I got an email from the Cliburn with a list of the engagements I
had for the following year. There were many recitals, and soon I was receiving
invitations from great orchestras to play concertos. I felt that I had reached
another dimension of my life.”
It was a dimension that was a long time coming. “My first competition
was when I was five years old,” she recalls. “My parents are both pianists and
they thought it was a nice opportunity to play for a couple of minutes in front
of an audience.” She went on to enter and win competitions around the world,
although competing was never the point.
“I don’t do competitions for the sake of it,” Rana says. “Competitions bring
concerts. That’s what I want to do—be a concert pianist.”
Being a Cliburn medalist assured her of that: a three-year management
contract was part of placing second in the prestigious quadrennial prize. “I
remember when they announced the six finalists, they immediately asked for
our passports because they were already going to apply for working visas in
the U.S. That’s amazing, no? You really feel that they are working for you, not
just for the competition.”
A close call
The Cliburn was not all smooth sailing, however: During her performance of
Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in the finals, a piano string broke in the third
movement. Potential disaster loomed. “What can you do?” she says, recalling a
silent prayer that it wouldn’t impact her performance. “You just have to keep
going and try to do your best. Life onstage is not relaxing. Somehow you
have to deal with it.”
The Cliburn was Rana’s swan song to competitions, since she now
has a career. This season she’s on an international recital tour with Bach’s
Goldberg Variations, and her debut CD—Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto
and Tchaikovsky’s First with Antonio Pappano and Orchestra dell’Accademia
Nazionale di Santa Cecilia—was named recording of the month by
BBC Magazine.
Rana doesn’t miss the pressure of competitions. “A couple of months ago I
had a nightmare that I was playing the Cliburn again,” she says. “I woke up and
thought, thank God it was a dream.”
Sebastian
Stevensson
29, bassoon
Winner, Gillet-Hugo-Fox International Bassoon Competition, 2014
Winner, Swedish Soloist Prize, 2016
Principal Bassoon, Danish National Symphony Orchestra
Sebastian Stevensson has an impressive record in international competitions,
but when asked which of them was most helpful to his career, his response is
surprising: “The one that went the very worst,” he says.
It was the 2013 Munich ARD International Music Competition, Germany’s
largest competition, whose instrument categories vary from year to year. The
ARD had been his very first competition, when he was 21, and that time he
had been the youngest candidate to make it to the second round. By 2013, he
not only had more competitions under his belt and had improved as a player,
he was principal bassoon with the Danish National Symphony.
“I thought I had a great chance of winning, and then I went there and
didn’t pass the first round,” he says. “It was hard—I probably spent 100 hours
working on a demanding piece commissioned by the competition (Nyx by Evis
Sammoutis) that I never performed—but the experience was also helpful for
me. I had to reconsider so many things about my playing. It was a breaking
point in my career.”
A musical america Guide to Top Competitions musicalamerica.com • February 2017