The curtain has fallen on the 2025 Chopin Competition, and Warsaw is catching its breath. For three weeks, the city lived and breathed Chopin, culminating in the high drama of the finals weekend. As is tradition, the entire competition – all in all, 102 hours of Chopin’s music – was sold out months in advance. The finals sparked a particular frenzy, with eager listeners crowding the lobby for a last-minute chance at a ticket. Online, the event reached a global scale, with live broadcasts drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers and total numbers soaring into the millions.
Another Chopin tradition held firm: the applause itself. As in an Italian opera house, the audience does not wait for a concerto to end, instead erupting into bravos already during the orchestra’s final notes.
After a long night of deliberations, the 17-member jury announced American pianist Eric Lu as the winner. “We worked very hard, and we had a number of very difficult discussions involving our opinions about artistic matters,” Jury Chair Garrick Ohlsson remarked. Yet, for all the sold-out halls and social media frenzy, a curious tension hummed beneath the surface. The internet was ablaze with debate; accusations were made and suspicions fervently expressed. However, the published scores, detailing the complex mechanics of the jury’s decision, gave no reason to doubt the integrity of the voting.
The system, which corrects individual scores to a specified margin from the arithmetic mean, is designed as a bulwark against bias. But this statistical streamlining has a significant side effect: it inherently favours consensus. Performers who take greater artistic risks and deviate from the norm find themselves at a disadvantage compared with those who offer sublime technical command and immaculate, yet safer, phrasing. Of course, this is nothing new in the competition world, but Warsaw’s focus on numerical scoring and the large jury of 17 (not to mention the repertoire constraints) makes it particularly difficult for truly “out-of-the-box” individual performances to succeed.
Without a doubt, Lu delivered immensely powerful, balanced and convincing performances. Yet other finalists, who took greater risks or showed stronger emotions and magic, were left to wonder what might have been. The votes were transparent and fair, yet they also highlighted the limits of this extraordinary system, which seemed to amplify the ever-present dilemma of having to “measure the unmeasurable”.
Perfection has become the new norm. As the Spanish-American pianist Josu de Solaun observes, we are now in the age of a “Global Neutral Style” – a breathtaking, unprecedented level of precision and polish that may ultimately be changing the very spirit of how we make and hear music. What we gain in flawless execution, we often lose in life itself. In our digital age, where everything is measurable and verifiable, we must remember that the heart of music lies in mystery, uncertainty and beautiful unverifiability. In the end, it is human imperfection, not perfect execution, that makes music come to life.
Florian Riem
