The Dublin International Piano Competition is down to its final four. So what does it tell us about the state of piano playing today, and where have all the Irish pianists gone?

FOR THE PAST 10 days, my life has been dominated by the piano. But there has been musical life away from the 52 solid hours of playing at the Dublin International Piano Competition, not least two concerts by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. The competition did, however, filter into the NSO’s subscription series (NCH, Dublin), when the 2009 winner, Alexej Gorlatch, played Prokofiev’s Third Concerto under Swedish conductor Patrik Ringborg.

Gorlatch is a class act, but his highly-polished Prokofiev on this occasion was underwhelming, as if he intended to make a point by taking some of the fizz out of the music. He wasn’t helped by the fact that the piano was masked by the orchestra at times when it needed to stand out clearly.

There were no balance problems in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which Ringborg delivered with such lightness of touch, and easy, fluid rubato that it seemed quite the most delightful of symphonies, with its darker sections making even more of an impression as a result. Soprano Elizabeth Watts’s contribution to the finale was sure and pure.

The concert included an extra, when violinist Timothy Kirwan, appearing for the last time before retirement after a remarkable 48 years of service, took over the leader’s chair for an invigoratingly sharp, fizzy and precise performance of Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture.

The following Friday it was again the symphony which stole the limelight. This time it was Shostakovich’s war-time Eighth, conducted by Hannu Lintu with intellectual rigour and fine technical discipline, which overshadowed octogenarian Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 2008 percussion concerto Incantations. Lintu made the Shostakovich sound about as impressively severe and stark as it can. Incantations seemed almost soft-core by comparison, in spite of the agile playing of the soloist, Colin Currie.

The relentless progress of the Dublin International Piano Competition has seen the 51 starters reduced to 24 for the second round, 12 for the semi-finals, and now just four have survived to compete in tonight’s finals with the NSO under James Cavanagh. They are Alexander Bernstein (23, USA, who will play Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto), Nikolay Khozyainov (19, Russia, Rachmaninov’s Third), Andrejs Osokins (27, Latvia, Prokofiev’s Third), and Jiayan Sun (22, China, Tchaikovsky’s First).

Unlike some earlier competitions, this year’s has lacked the kind of partisan argument – or communal agreement – about eventual winners that has been a feature of earlier years. The field seems grayish, as it were, without the clarity that certain consistently characterful players can bring. And that probably makes the jury’s task that little bit harder.

Anyone perplexed at the decisions might do well to think of the jury not as a panel of adjudicators, but rather as an electorate. And electorates can only work with the voting system they are given. The competition’s system doesn’t allow for discrimination between a vote that is given in wild enthusiasm and one that comes from dutifully filling up the required quota of names. Individual jury members can be as perplexed at the outcomes as a member of the audience. Also bear in mind that the jury members are obliged to take all of a competitor’s performances into account each time they vote.

Take Latvia’s Reinis Zarins, who peaked in Bach and Messiaen in round one, and scuppered his chances in the semi-finals by failing to do other than technical service to Beethoven’s daunting Hammerklavier Sonata. I wondered if the always capable Alexander Bernstein might do the same, when he rather lost the wood for the trees in the long finale of Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata, but his impressive performance of fellow American Leon Kirchner’s Five Pieces surely helped him over the line.

Nikolay Khozyainov peaked at exactly the right time. I thought his round-one handling of Liszt’s Après une lecture de Dante sought excitement through noise. But his semi-final showpiece, Liszt’s incomplete Fantasy on two themes from Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro as worked on by Moriz Rosenthal and Ferruccio Busoni, was an astonishing ride that delivered its thrills in ways that were both hair-raising and sophisticated.

Latvian Andrejs Osokins was a mixed bag in round one. The beauty of a Bach Prelude and Fugue and Liszt’s arrangement of Schumann’s song Widmung was outweighed by a disappointing Prokofiev Seventh Sonata. But he recovered in round two, with stylish, flexible performances of Haydn, Debussy and Liszt, and held his contemplative nerve in the slow movement of Beethoven’s last sonata in the semi-finals.

China’s Jiayan Sun presented the most daringly varied of the semi-finals programmes – a Beethoven sonata (Op 78), a Schumann Novelette, three Debussy Preludes and Bartók’s Out of Doors Suite, this latter mostly shunning the barbaric approach to Bartók that so many young players delight in.

One player of note that I’ve not mentioned so far is Jenny Chen (18, Taiwan). She got as far as round two, and clearly has the makings of a major talent, although currently her formidable keyboard command can be found mixing puppyish abandon with moments of striking maturity. And Ji Liu (22, China) probably brought a smile to everyone’s face with his perky round-two handling of a jazzy piece from Friedrich Gulda’s Play Piano Play.

Ireland’s pianists disappeared from the stage with 22-year-old Nadene Fiorentini’s elimination in round two. She was at her best in round one, giving an aromatic account of Messiaen’s Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus, and seemed altogether less assured in her second-round choices.

Irish achievement in the competition peaked when Finghin Collins reached the semi-finals in 1997, making him the only Irish pianist ever to make it past the second round. There’s a separate pre-selection process for Irish players through a special Irish round that is held five months prior to the competition itself. Back in 1988, 14 young players competed and six players made it through the process. This year, only four entered for the Irish round, with three succeeding. I’m not sure what this says about the state of piano-playing and music education in Ireland. But it would certainly suggest that something serious must be amiss for the numbers to have declined so steeply.

Contemporary-music specialists the Crash Ensemble last month announced the appointment of cellist Kate Ellis (left) as co-artistic director. The current artistic director, composer Donnacha Dennehy, is moving to Princeton University for 18 months from September to take up a teaching position, and he will remain with Crash as co-artistic director. The ensemble has also announced its participation in next November’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, one of Europe’s major forums for new music. Crash opens the festival with a Dennehy portrait concert, and will also give an American programme of works by Glenn Branca, Nico Muhly and Arnold Dreyblatt.