Making Menuhin: A Documentary

The menuhin competition, quite simply, is the best in the world for young violinists.

And in 2020, we were due to go to Richmond, Virginia.

Once news of the COVID 19 pandemic started to filter through, we realized that something was going to have to change with the competition.

We had to do the competition virtually.

We were asking them to record in the middle of a global pandemic, and a lot of countries were in different phases of lockdown.

All of us involved in the competition were absolutely determined that we would put on a show for the world.

Major funding provided by funding also provided by Additional funding provided by I have always loved challenges, and for me, competitions are just a way of giving the best of myself to set myself a goal and then actually achieve that goal.

one of the best parts about a competition is meeting the other competitors and making new friends in music And so I was really looking forward to that in Richmond.

I had heard performances from my peers that had entered the Menuhin in competition, and I had always looked up to them and I decided to enter I'm a pretty quiet person for sure, but when I play, I feel like I can express myself a lot better than if I was talking or something like that.

And yeah, there's so much room for freedom and creativity.

And I love it.

It was always like a dream of mine to compete in this competition because it's basically the biggest competition for young violinists.

I saw it would be now or never if I want to participate in this competition.

The menuhin competition is an international competition for the 44 best young violinists in the world under the age of 22, Yehudi Menuhin was, of course, one of the great violinists of the 20th century.

He was a child prodigy.

He had an incredible repertoire.

Yehudi Menuhin was so interested in the development of these young people, not just as players, but as human beings.

And his idea was to bring people from all over the world so that they could learn not just about music from each other, but about their own cultures, about how they can relate to each other, make friends.

Every two years, the menuhin competition moves somewhere new.

In 2012, we were in Beijing.

In 2014, we were in Austin, Texas.

In 2016, we came back to London.

And in 2018 we were in Geneva.

And in 2020, we were due to go to Richmond, Virginia when we, the city of Richmond, competed to host the competition, we were competing against New York, London.

In 2017, I've been living in Richmond for two years, and the thing that I knew about the city, which I was surprised about, quite frankly, was that it's an incredibly cultural musical and artistic city.

Hello, friends of the Menuhin competition.

I am Maria Duenas, I'm a Spanish violinist living in Vienna, which is a wonderful city that I love.

The competition is split into two age groups one under 21 and one under 15, so it's almost as if there are two competitions happening concurrently.

We have three rounds.

The first rounds begins with 22 competitors in each of our categories, and we have nine senior competitors who go through into the semifinals and ten juniors who go through to the semifinals.

We then cut that down even further in the final rounds.

We have four competing senior finalists and five competing junior finalists.

I was very, very happy when I when I saw the email that I was chosen as one of the 22 senior candidates and also I have never been to the U.S..

I really wanted to see Virginia, Richmond.

All these 22 competitors were amazing violinists, so I was really looking forward to meeting all of them and to be able to play on the same stage with all of them We went through the process of selecting our candidates for May 2020 in Richmond.

It soon became apparent that once news of the COVID 19 pandemic started to filter through, something was going to have to change with the competition.

We had competitors in China where by January 2020, it is already clear the pandemic had taken hold.

We obviously have competitors coming from Europe.

We realized that we were not going to be able to bring all of our young musicians to Virginia.

There was no way of doing that.

That would have kept them and our audiences safe, particularly during the early days of the pandemic, when there were so many unknown factors.

We had gotten really close by the time the pandemic hit in the US and Virginia.

We were only two months out from the competition.

And so we took the decision to cancel 2020 and delayed by a year because we all thought in a year's time it must be over.

Nobody dreamt that it would be so horrendous for the whole world.

When it was clear that the competition wouldn't take part in 2020, it had to be postponed.

I felt very disappointed because that meant I couldn't take part in it.

And because in 2021, I had my graduation exams in high school That meant I had to choose whether I would play the competition, I would go to Richmond or I would write my exams.

We made that decision in December that we would go virtual with the first round of the competition with the real hope that with the advent of the vaccines that there might be a hope of us all having slightly smaller competition in person.

And May 2021.

Even though as we thought about the prospect of going virtual, my heart sank and I was very... that I really didn't want to face up to that as a as a possibility.

I had every confidence that we could pull it off.

There was some trepidation, of course, the competition had never done this, but also the entire world was figuring out suddenly, how do you present concerts online?

How do you present competitions online?

What does classical music look like in this digital world I'm very pleased that I can participate in the Menuhin competition, even though I have to play virtually.

I'm thinking that will be a special experience for me during the pandemic, but also sad because I won't have a chance to get to know other talented young musicians.

We told the competitors in December 2020 that they would need to record their first rounds from home.

We were asking them to record in the middle of a global pandemic and a lot of countries were in different phases of lockdown.

The competitors did an incredible job of finding venues, they found churches, they found halls that were possibly open but not used for the public.

People found recording studios.

People didn't have the option to play with other people and couldn't hire a pianist.

And so we changed some of the repertoire to be solo repertoire.

I was definitely not confident for a long time, but as a one I got more comfortable with like the posible recording.

I had to do it a coup times and kind of preparing.

But I was definitely recording myself more when I was practicing, because that was how people were going to hear it.

When you're playing, I just feel that there's so much emotion and so many emotions, so you can't really count them, but then you feel them and then you kind of interpret them and then you convey them to the audience, and it's really kind of creates a special space for everyone.

For me, it was as if I were playing for a life audience, because I think if you play as if you're doing a recording, then the audience, they can feel that you're intimidated or that you're not being yourself.

So, yeah, I just try to imagine an audience in front of me, and that just really gave everything of myself as if I would really be on stage.

We were hoping that we would still be able to bring semifinalists in the finals to Richmond to that point.

But by the middle and of January, that became clear that that wasn't feasible.

So then we informed the competitors and the rest of the world at the end of January that everything was going to go virtual.

The first rounds were submitted by mid-February.

And then they found out if they advanced to the semifinals within a week and then they had about six weeks to record their semifinal video And then they found out if they were a finalist by the mid to end of April and they had three weeks to record their final video.

But the competitors, this whole process was much more spread out than it would have been if they came to Richmond and everything was done within eleven days.

So we had really extensive discussions about the very practical ways that we could make the competition as fair as possible, given the very differing venues, situations that our young competitors find themselves in the most stressful thing for me.

Both the recording and the virtual competition was to actually stay in accordance with the rules because we had to play with a clock visible.

And then the livestreams, a lot of people asked about what the clock is all about, a performance had to be uncut, so you had to play all the pieces of a round in one go and then you had to proctor to verify it.

And that was basically the deal with the clock.

It wasn't because we all had the same idea that clock would be nice.

Yeah.

I personally don't find it more difficult to judge somebody through video than live.

I find both really difficult because we're not talking about sports, which can be measured right?

Nobody gets to the finish line ahead of somebody else.

In the end, I'm responding viscerally to somebody's performance.

I guess there is a slight difference, which is that when it's live, you have a better chance of feeling the communication from the stage to the audience.

But I use my own barometer when judging anybody, which is what I call the goosebump factor.

If my hair stands on end, it's something that I'd like to probably hear again and to these competitors credit I got the goosebumps and so many of these videos.

And I don't think the fact that it was virtual hampered them in any way.

Because we changed the nature of the competition.

It meant we also had to change some of the required repertoire for them to play.

The semifinals, all of the pieces that I was preparing for the first round, I could now drop.

And I was preparing for a completely different program.

Normally we have a chamber music requirement, and our final round is with an orchestra.

But this isn't possible when you are asking your competitors to record remotely.

A lot of the competition when it's in person is about them spending a lot of time together, going to meet all these people from around the world who are like them, who are their peers in age trying to perform at this extremely high level.

And when everything is virtual, it was really hard to do.

My mom just called me, she was like, You got an email from The Menuhin competition.

So I was like, trembling a bit when I saw the email and then when I saw I made it to the final round, I was unbelievably happy.

It was always a little bit of stress underneath.

You have to do the recording.

You wrote down.

You were to do it tomorrow, so it's need to be good after it.

I went to the home and I was very happy.

I think the first thing I did was sleep.

When you get to that point, there's more pressure because you're in the finals.

There's more focus on you rather than multiple people.

Reaching the finals gave me a huge shot of adrenaline for me, just getting to the finals was a very, very big prize.

Anybody that's in the finals is already at a very, very high level.

And so the challenge is just to put them in what feels like the right order.

Hello.

Hi.

Lovely to meet you.

So Carissa, I am delighted to tell you that you have won the fourth prize and thank you.

You know, it's totally subjective.

You have to go on what you know is a certain high level of instrumentalism in addition to what touches you So, Hana, I'm delighted to tell you that you have won the third prize.

Thank you so much.

Simon, I am delighted to tell you that you have won the second prize.

OK, thanks so much.

It's father's day in Germany today, so I mean, it's a great present also for him, he's working right now, so.

For me, it's the person who's playing, I remember at the end of the day that spoke to me.

That's the person I want to hear again.

I am delighted to tell you, Maria, that you have won the first prize.

Wow, really?

Oh my God.

It's amazing!

Thank you so much.

0h my God.

I think the competitors gained a lot by actually trying to work through the problems that they faced.

They learned how to present themselves on camera.

They learned a huge amount of repertoire because some of them completely changed the repertoire between their application and their actual recordings.

In all, they will have had a different experience than the one they were expecting, but hopefully a very positive one after the competition between everything, we received over 6 million views of our content.

We saw levels of engagement that were pretty unprecedented for us as a small classical music organization.

The future of the prize winners and non prize winners is great because especially this year, because it was online, so many people heard these players and that ultimately is the reason to do a competition is to be heard.

And there are plenty of examples of people who never won big prizes in major international competitions that have huge careers.

I still gained so much from this experience.

It gave me a lot of time to self-reflect and dove into the nitty gritty of my playing and my technique.

I feel like I know myself better as a musician and as a person than I did prior to the competition.

It was a really great learning opportunity for one, and it was just great to have something to be motivated about and to look forward to and to work towards.

You can always find a possibility if you really want to.

It's, I think, a very positive thing I've had from the competition experience Even though this experience was completely different than I ever would have imagined, it was definitely worth it.

As the first prize winner of the Menuhin Competition all I can say is dreams come true because the Menuhin competition was a dream for me and it has become true.

If you have passion and trust yourself, then everything can become true.

If there's any time when we needed to find a way to ensure that we could put on the competition it would be during a pandemic.

Is it the same as, you know, having it in person?

I...

I don't think so.

But is it better than having canceled the competition?

Absolutely.

It was really important for us to go ahead with the competition because music is something that sustains us.

It's important to us as human beings.

It makes us feel things, it helps us cope with difficult times.

Major funding provided by funding also provided by Additional funding provided by