BANFF – Cymbal-izing the soon to be beginning of summer, the competitors for Banff International String Quartet Competition (BISQC) were announced and it’s shaping up to be a note-worthy week for musicians and music aficionado’s alike.
Hailing from places such as Russia, France, the U.K., Spain, Taiwan and the Great White North, this year’s chosen quartets are some of the world’s most talented string instrument musicians.
The competition itself is highly acclaimed in the world of music and boasts of being “the most coveted prize in chamber music” – even for those who don’t win. In fact, Barry Shiffman, the executive director of BISCQ and former winner of the competition, said the weeklong event is lucrative in many ways for all competing groups.
“All of the quartets that come, they get the week of making music before that empowering audience, we cover the costs of bringing them here, we house them, we feed them,” he said.
“And the seven groups that don’t make the finals, they all receive a career development grant of $4,000 from the Banff Centre.”
On top of the grant, quartets attending are professionally filmed in high definition and streamed around the world, providing a prodigious opportunity for promotable materials. Concert promoters are also in attendance, which can often create an abundance of opportunities for groups who don’t make the finals.
“You can’t lose coming to this
competition and people know that,” Shiffman said.
“Being one of the 10 quartets that was chosen based on the preliminary auditions is already a pretty big win for these groups.”
Shiffman said the competition’s winner ends up with close to $300,000 in prizes, including a three-year career development package, concert tours of Canada, the U.S. and Europe, and recordings at the Banff Centre.
Jonathon Lo, cellist for the Rolston Quartet, winners of the 2016 BISQC, said his team has flourished since their time on the mountain town stage.
“As cliché as this might be, it has been a life-changing experience ever since –a dream come true,” he told the Outlook.
“It really allowed and enabled us to fulfill some of our dreams as a quartet and as four Canadian musicians to have the opportunity to travel all around the world and to hopefully share our love of what we do with concert goers and people who decide to come to our performances.”
Lo said the competition can be very intimidating but he wants to stress to the 10 competitors this year to try to overcome that feeling and truly embrace the experience before them.
“Even though it is a competition I think that the 10 quartets can really just be themselves, to share with the audience who they are as certainly musicians and what is their identity as a quartet,” he said.
“Soak up everything that it has to offer. I think they’ll find the audience and the environment at the Banff competition is really unlike anything else that exists.”
Shiffman helps to paint a picture of exactly what that environment looks and feels like for all competitors and audience members.
“The competition is really a one-week full immersion festival into music and that’s why I think it’s so successful,” he said.
“That it’s not just about identifying who’s the best, of course that’s incredibly important … but that’s not most interesting thing we do. The most interesting is the coming together of close to 1,000 people that are really digging this art form and that is really, really exciting.”
The competitors this year are from all over the world; the Viano String Quartet (Canada/USA), the Vera Quartet (Spain/USA), the Ulysses Quartet (Canada/USA/Taiwan) are just three of the ten competitors that will grace the stage this summer.
The competition runs from
August 26 to September 1 at the Banff Centre. Tickets and more information can be found at www.bisqc.ca.
