ARE YOU WILLING TO TAKE A RISK? Former CEO of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic, Deborah Borda talks about conducting competitions, jury rules, and Gustavo Dudamel
WFIMC: You have been on the jury of a number of important competitions. Recently, you spent two weeks in the Netherlands as Chair of the International Conducting Competition Rotterdam. Deborah Borda: It is called a competition because you select a winner at the end, or in our case, winners. They both had excellent skills, yet they were different from each other. But what struck me about the competition was the scope of it: it´s not simply a star turn, but it’s really being aimed at developing young artists. For more than a year, they develop the finalists. They take them to Vienna and London, they introduce them to people. That is so different from any other competition- it just puts it in a whole different league for me. I think the actual experience for the conductors is almost the equivalent of getting a master´s degree.
juries. The challenge was to integrate and meld the incoming specialty juries with the core jury. There were 5 separate groups of “specialists” for each category: people like Dame Jane Glover and Iván Fischer came for Baroque music, composers like Brett Dean, Eric Whitacre and Cathy Milliken came for the contemporary round, Sarah Hicks (a terrific conductor who has a pops specialty) came for the pops concert in the park, and Vasily Petrenko and Han-Na Chang came for the finals with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. It was fascinating to have two juries to work together, and they all did very well. If you were on the core jury, you worked for 10 days straight, which was exhausting. But it was also a wonderful learning experience for us.
How does it compare with the other competitions you judged?
The program was quite demanding.
The other competition jury I´m on is the Mahler Conducting Competition, which is also excellent. It´s very different, although it is also spread out over a significant period of time. It has very different operating rules. In Rotterdam, we didn´t discuss the conductors until after we voted; in Bamberg, we discussed as we went. Here, the repertoire is more spread out, even though at the Mahler they also do classical and contemporary repertoire. And then, of course, there is a big Mahler symphony, which is quite a challenge for most young conductors.
In one week, they conducted five concerts, each with three rehearsals, with wildly different programs! This is something that a senior conductor in the United States would never do. Yes, they had time to prepare, but five different programs on three rehearsals within a week- that is a marathon. They were exhausted at the end, but not only physically: it was an intellectual marathon, it was a growth marathon for them.
It was also a marathon for the core jury!
Probably the contestants were not that aware of this, but there were five different
Conducting Competitions
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