AT PIANO competitions you can tell something, though not everything, from the way contestants approach the gleaming black beast on the platform. At the final session of the sixth London International Piano Competition Jason Lloyd Gilham, 18, from Australia, arrived as though about to shake hands with a maiden aunt. Crumpled with nerves and gloom, Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, also 18, from France, seemed to be walking to his execution. Herbert Schuch, from Germany, 25, strolled towards the piano as if crossing a wine bar toward a friend. He won, of course.
But appearances can be deceptive, not least for critics who roll up for the finale without the jury’s benefit of having heard entrants in a wide range of repertoire. On the basis of his Emperor