Guido van Oorschot – de Volkskrant, 20 Sep 2008
Sopranos have left their mark on the 47th International Vocal Competition (IVC), with almost eighty finding their way to Den Bosch. The remaining candidates are a colourful mixture of Russian countertenors, Asiatic mezzo princesses and baritones with a decided air of Don Giovanni about them. Really worth seeing are the bald-headed Polish twins, one of whom is competing as a baritone and the other as a male soprano.
Men who sing at such a high pitch were not yet on the scene in 1975 when mezzo-soprano Annett Andriesen was one of the prize-winners in the competition; today she is undergoing her baptism of fire as the competition’s new general director.
She has already noticed that the competition is still a nerve-wracking experience: ‘Last week during the elimination rounds the candidates sang for between ten and twelve minutes each, after which the first judgements were announced. You have to be able to cope with this type of stress. We don’t push them through mechanically, though; we take the time to speak to each candidate individually and to give advice based on their individual strengths and weaknesses.’
Andriesen was already a member of the board of IVC when the general director’s position fell vacant in March 2007; her colleagues asked her if she would be interested in taking up the position. She had a great deal of production experience in the opera world, having sung mezzo character roles from Amsterdam to Barcelona to San Francisco. She has done the necessary coaching work and still teaches at the Amsterdam Conservatory.
There was quite an amount of work to do in Den Bosch; Andriesen quietly states: ‘the competition’s reputation had sagged somewhat. I grasped the situation with both hands and I now think that we’ve found the way ahead.’
The biennial singing competition now attracts more candidates than ever before. The programme lists 139 candidates from 34 countries and the audiences are also growing proportionately. There is not a seat to be had for the finals in the Theater aan de Parade on Sunday 28 September — this was not previously the case.
The IVC is one of the oldest music competitions still extant. From its beginnings in 1954 it has presented such prize-winners as Elly Ameling, Robert Holl, Jard van Nes, Nelly Miricioiu and Thomas Hampson. Over the passage of time, however, the competition gradually lost its appeal: it was criticised for too many prize-winners that were only of medium quality. Young singers began to prefer to travel to places with higher prize money and greater media attention such as Cardiff’s BBC Singer of the World and Brussels’ Queen Elisabeth Competition.
Annett Andriesen is therefore not the first director of the competition to encounter a certain scepticism from the city council of Den Bosch: ‘there was talk of a cut in our subsidy when I took up this position, but in the meantime the city has decided to support us completely. The provincial government itself has more than doubled its subsidy.’
Visibility in the mass media is one of her greatest priorities. Rather than ‘send brochures to Siberia’, Andriesen prefers to gain attention for her competition by featuring it on relevant websites; she has also organised video cameras to record the entire competition.
‘You’ve lost the battle without visual data. This year it unfortunately hasn’t been possible to get air time for the competition on national television, although you’ll be able to follow the competition via the Cultura website and on several local Brabant stations. Netherlands Radio 4 will broadcast the finals live.’
It was a big problem in the past that singers would enrol for the competition and then decide not to come to Den Bosch at the very last moment. This applied to 60 out of the total 108 candidates in 2006. To avoid a similar situation Andriesen has greatly strengthened contacts with conservatories and opera studios both in the Netherlands and abroad. Another clever plan she instituted was the holding of preliminary auditions in New York and Riga.
Andriesen: ‘New York is simply the place to be at this moment and Latvia lies within easy reach for East European talent. From our auditions there we were able to place 29 candidates directly into the first round. Another great advantage of this is that you get to know everyone in advance. And it worked: everybody came.’
Andriesen intends to expand the system of external elimination rounds further for the 2010 competition. ‘American colleagues have already asked me if we could hold auditions on the West coast as well. The more candidates you have, the higher you can set the standard of the competition.’
