By Laurie Niles: It is no secret that the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition officially allows a wide degree of latitude when it comes to jury members having students in the competition and vice-versa. Put simply: jury members can have students in the competition, and they also can submit scores for their own students.
How can this possibly work?
Several days ago I spoke with jury co-chair David Stern, who is the son of the late Isaac Stern, and I asked him just that. His answer: radical transparency.
Jurors' scores will be posted to the public, and during the competition Stern said he reminds jurors daily of this fact. (To see the scores, visit the competition website.) Not only that, after every round is complete, the competition holds a two-hour session in which each juror sits at a separate table and violinists who have been eliminated in that round can go around and speak personally, one-on-one and face-to-face, with each jury member.![Jury meetings]()
Jury members speak face-to-face with contestants that did not move on to the semi-finals in the Shanghai competition.
When it comes to jurors having students in the competition, "it's allowed because there's no way to prevent it," Stern said. The violin world is small, and those relationships are going to exist, whether they are disclosed or not. And if one were to ban teachers from scoring the performances of their students in a competition, then are there other kinds of relationships that would also need to be banned? What about scoring the performances of a colleague's students? Or the performances of students with whom they did one master class? Or students who participated in a performance with them? Or the student whose father they taught back in the '70s?
Stern's idea is to simply put it all out in the open, and then to put heavy incentives on voting honestly.
"We've decided to allow them to vote for their own students, but they have to claim that they are their students, so we know it's their students, and we see their scores," Stern said. In the program, contestants' biographies list their teachers. "Ultimately, and this is what I'm saying to the members of the jury: every vote is going to be scrutinized. What you write is going to be public, and you cannot erase it. So if you mess up, you will be taken to task."
Stern said that co-chair, Vera Tsu Weiling, a violin teacher herself, told the jury members, "Do not fear voting badly for your student, if that student did not do well. And do not feel badly for for voting badly for a student of a colleague."
The jury for the SISIVC 2018 is co-chaired by Stern and Weiling, who is professor of violin at both Shanghai and Beijing Conservatories. Other members of the jury include violinist Maxim Vengerov and Shanghai Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Guillaume Molko (who replaced violinist Augustin Dumay in the semi-finals); violin pedagogues Zakhar Bron, Dora Schwarzberg and Daniel Heifetz; Shanghai Quartet violinist Weigang Li; Emerson Quartet violinist Philip Setzer; former NY Phil concertmaster Glenn Dicterow; Munich Philharmonic concertmaster Sreten Krstic; artist manager Martin Campbell-White; Philharmonie de Paris programming director Emmanuel Hondré, and leaders in China's violin scene Lina Yu and Siqing Lu.
When it comes to the finalists who were announced on Friday, some have connections with jury members and some do not. Also, some jurors' students did not advance, such as Bron's, whose former student won first place in the 2016 Shanghai competition.
In the interest of transparency, here is a run-down of the finalists in the Shanghai competition, their teachers and whether they are on the jury:
Jury members speak face-to-face with contestants that did not move on to the semi-finals in the Shanghai competition.
- Jia Yi Chen, of China, studies with jury member Lina Yu at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
- Olga roubková, of Czech Republic, is a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory who studied with Viktor Pikajzen and now studies with Adam Kostecki at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hannover, neither whom is on the jury.
- Diana Tishchenko, of Ukraine, studied with Ulf Wallin at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" Berlin and with Boris Kuschnir at University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, neither whom is on the jury.
- Chang Yuan Ting, of Canada, studies with jury member Dora Schwarzberg as well as Lucia Hall at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
- Nancy Zhou, of the United States, studied with Miriam Fried at the New England Conservatory and counts Anne Sophie Mutter as a mentor -- neither is on the jury.
- Yun Tang, of China, studies with Pierre Amoyal at the Mozarteum University Salzburg and is a former student of jury member Lina Yu.