Important watershed

The fifth Dublin International Piano Competition marked an important but hitherto unnoted watershed.

It was the last competition open to anyone who, on age grounds, could conceivably have entered the first competition back in 1988. The improvement in young players' technique over the period (or perhaps in the skills of artistic director John O'Conor's preselection routines) has been remarkable.

Yet it's the music where the mastery of the notes is far from being a stumbling block (Bach, Haydn and Mozart, in particular) that some of the weakest playing has been heard.

I had been puzzling a lot about this, until someone pointed out that the flush of poorly conceived Bach and Mozart was prompted by the existence of special prizes.

Inevitably, these prizes, however well-intentioned (and there are others for Field and Schubert) are causing what you might call a market distortion in one of the competition's unique selling points, the free choice of repertoire which is afforded competitors in Dublin. Perhaps it's time for these prizes to be reallocated for the best individual performances of the recital rounds, irrespective of composer.

Those recital rounds remain at the musical heart of the competition, testing the players in matters of taste, style and programme-building in a way concerto finals never can.

Chamber music, sadly, has never been a feature in Dublin as it is in some competitions, so it falls to the concertos with the NSO to test the players in the quicksilver dynamics of musical co-operation - young musicians very hugely in their ability to signal musical intentions through their playing.

The first prizewinner, Alexei Nabioulin, may be only 21, but this young Russian is endowed with the necessary skills in abundance. Add in flamboyance and musical charisma, and you have a winning formula. For me, perhaps his most impressive achievement in the Prokofiev was the way he sustained the trajectory of the third movement, a problem rarely well resolved by even the most distinguished of performers.

Second-placed Chiao-Ying Chang from Taiwan crowned her earlier accomplishments with a nobly warm-hearted account of Chopin's Second Concerto, finding just the right sort of micro-detailing to keep this, the lesser of Chopin's two concertos, from sounding stale or repetitive.

Third-placed Kirill Gerstein, a New York-based Russian, saved his best for the finals, trumping all his earlier work with a reading of Brahms's First Concerto so fearlessly thrusting that it sometimes left Alexander Anissimov and the NSO lingering in his wake.

The performances of Canada's David Jalbert, the Russian-born German Evgeny Sudbin and Yugoslavian Lidija Bizjak all failed in various ways to find their mark.

Then, when the jury had chosen to eliminate far more interesting players like Roberto Poli, Ashley Wass and Roger Wright from earlier rounds, an uneven balance in the finals was only to be expected. But that doesn't in any way compromise the final result. For my money, Alexei Nabioulin is the finest winner this competition has produced since Pavel Nersessian in 1991.