# Incidents at competitions where member of jury protests majority decision vehemently



## Fenestella (Oct 4, 2015)

According to wikipedia, at the Geneva International Competition in 1946, where the majority of the jury decided to award the first prize to Gulda over Backx, "one of the jurors, Eileen Joyce, who favoured Backx, stormed out and claimed the other jurors were unfairly influenced by Gulda's supporters"; at the International Chopin Competition in 1980, the jury's decision to exclude Pogorelić from the finalists' list led Martha Argerich to "resign from the jury in protest".

Are there more incidents like these at prestigious competitions?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Freddie Kempf?

This from Wikipedia:



> Kempf's early adult career benefited from his failure to win the 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where the first prize in the piano section went instead to Denis Matsuev. Apparently, some judges had wanted to award the first prize jointly to Matsuev and Kempf, and had successfully negotiated with the Russian Culture Ministry for the additional funding. However, Kempf only collected the third prize in the end, which provoked a barrage of indignant protests from both the audience and the Russian press, who accused some of the judges of bias, especially towards contestants who also happened to be their former pupils.[10][11] In April 1999, Kempf returned to Moscow with a series of television broadcasts and sold-out concerts. His popularity has been compared with that garnered by American pianist Van Cliburn who, in a different result in 1958, had won the inaugural competition.[10]


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

In the 1970s, Youri Egorov's failure to win the van Cliburn Competition seemed to be such a scandal, but I don't recall if any Jurors protested. I heard him live and was tremendously impressed. The winner that year was Stephen deGroot.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

There was the incident at one pf the Leeds competitions where the judges wanted to exclude Radu Lupu but Fanny Waterman declared she would never run another competition if that happened. Lupu went on to win, of course.


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

I like the anecdote that while Richter was a judge for the first Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, he kept giving Van Cliburn's performances straight 10s, while giving everyone else straight 0s. When confronted about this, he responded simply, "he was good, the others were not", or something to that effect. :lol: He was never invited back onto the panel at subsequent competitions. 

Anyone know the veracity of all this? I've heard it repeated a few times.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

flamencosketches said:


> I like the anecdote that while Richter was a judge for the first Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, he kept giving Van Cliburn's performances straight 10s, while giving everyone else straight 0s. When confronted about this, he responded simply, "he was good, the others were not", or something to that effect. :lol: He was never invited back onto the panel at subsequent competitions.
> 
> Anyone know the veracity of all this? I've heard it repeated a few times.


I just so want this to be true. :devil:


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## Turangalîla (Jan 29, 2012)

Not quite the same thing, but last year there was a pianist (Sergey Belyavsky) who refused an Honorable Mention at the Paderewski Competition because he believed the voting was rigged. When voting for first place, there was a tie between him and another contestant...when they revoted (this time only between those two), the other contestant came first. But then in subsequent votes for second and third place, some of the jury changed their votes from Belyavsky to other contestants, which led to him not getting any of the three prizes and instead an Honorable Mention. I couldn't believe this was true, but you can check the official voting papers made public by the competition and it's exactly what happened.

(Disclaimer: I have many, many problems with the Slipped Disc, but in this case it was the only article I could find that had the relevant information)https://slippedisc.com/2019/11/protest-pianist-why-i-refused-to-play-at-paderewski-farce/


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