Hard to say really. It really depends on who is in the jury panel. I'm a college music student and I have heard quite a bit about competitions. Some are rumors and some are true stories. You can play you very best and would get eliminated in the first round for one competition, and play very badly and win for another. Basically everyone tells me that the standard of big competitions (such as Van Cliburn, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky) is so high that anyone who manages to make it to the final round are considered very fine pianists. What makes the difference between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place is pretty much a lottery. So if the orchestra is sloppy and it diminishes your performance, then sucks to be you. If the jury is in a bad mood and for any reason, does not like the music you chose for the competition, sucks to be you even if you play very well.
Knowing all this, do the artist management and concert series organizers care about these possible inaccuracies and injustices? No! They just want your resume to look impressive so that they can get the dwindling Classical-music-loving public to buy tickets. This is the imbalance of the Classical music world today. Too many musicians graduate from colleges and are just thrown into the world competing with virtually everyone who graduated decades before themselves. There's no job securities or any promises of performance opportunities. Which is why in the beginning of the film, Paul sees his friend teaching a bunch of kids who wouldn't care less about music lessons. Lots of people ended up doing this, or worse, gave up music altogether and work in a completely different profession.
On an even more depressing note, many music students, knowing that this is the real world out there, tried to find shortcuts to success by bribing or simply sucking-up to the "big shots". I've heard too many stories about music professors marrying or dating their students who are half their age. The worst one I heard is between a music prof in his 70s having a girlfriend who just turned 20 and she just so happens to be his student. Guess who they will try to promote when opportunities show up?
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liscarkat-2
8 years ago
It's depressing that a musician as talented as Paul, or any of the competitors in the movie, would be relegated to a life in some dreary $12k a year job unless he or she won a major competition. Although it might take that kind of exposure to become a music celebrity, it seems that there must be many places in orchestras, studio work, etc. But, as AquaExecution said, there are just too many musicians for the available opportunities, coupled with a dwindling audience for classical music. I once knew two talented pianists who could only find work as ballet class accompanists, giving piano lessons on the side.
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