A five-star review of the Watford Festival Piano Competition

If you wish to predict the international star pianists of the next generation, you could not do better than attend the Christopher Duke Piano Recital Competition at the Clarendon Muse, forming part of the Watford Festival.

It was won by Jinah Shim. She is now a sudent at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her experience already includes professional performances of some of the great piano concertos, as well as solo and chamber works.

For this competition she made an imaginative choice of pieces to play: to start, she chose a Scarlatti sonata, which she interpreted with proper briskness and clarity. Granted that this composer sounds best on a harpsichord, this was the right way to play Scarlatti on the piano - during the afternoon, another competitor had tried to play his music as if it were romantic.

The competition requires every competitor to play something by Chopin; she chose the posthumous Valse in E minor. By the end of the afternoon, the audience must have been tired of Chopin valses, wonderful though they are.

Jinah's main offering was Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse - a characteristic example of his impressionist depiction in sound of events in a natural landscape. For this, the rumbling start in the bass was appropriate, whereas another competitor, playing Liszt, succumbed to temptation and did it just for show. The whole work, including for instance the descriptive lyrical passages and storm effects, required the virtuosity which seems to come naturally to someone with this talent. Even more important, perhaps, is Jinah's immersion in the music, demonstrated by her movements on the piano stool.

Another Chopin Valse, the one in A minor, opus 34 no. 2, was played by Liga Korne. She too had made an imaginative choice for her main contribution: a Sonata by Dutilleux, in which her technique was put to the test. She showed good judgement, for instance, in two-hand co-ordination and in the alternations of speeds. She is a Latvian who studied in Riga and is now at the Royal Northern College of Music. She was awarded the second prize.

Drew Steanton, entirely English trained and now at the Guildhall School of Music, played a well known Chopin Valse, the one in B minor, opus 69 no. 2, and went on to Liszt's Sonata in B minor. His technique is spectacular but his judgement in sometimes unreliable, the tempos extreme and the pedalling sometimes clumsy. Perhaps such an ambitious work tempts a young artist to over-confidence. Drew won the third prize.

The judges, Elizabeth Hayes and Ann Martin-Davis, seemed just as fresh after hours of concentratiuon. Also both English trained and naturally having wide esperience here and elsewhere, they deserve credit for their informative concluding addresses. No one who attended this event could doubt the potential of English piano playing in changing musical and economic conditions.