St Mary’s Music School Competition
St Mary’s Cathedral 9/6/26
St Mary’s Music School: Director’s Recital Prize Final
I had the great privilege to be invited to the final of the school music recital competition in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh’s West End on Tuesday evening, 9th June. This however is not just any school’s music prize, but that of Scotland’s premier music school, St Mary’s. Any school which has, as its raison d’être, the pursuit of excellence in music is going to have a standard of musicianship way above the average, and this proved to be the case.
I have been lucky enough to have been invited to several performances and showcases involving St Mary’s over the last few years, and have been delighted to pass on my impressions to our readers at EMR. This was however the first time I have been able to attend the final of the Director’s Recital Prize. Readers will know from my EMR Blog and my recently published memoirs book, A Singer’s Life, that I am not a great fan of musical competitions in general, even though I profited myself from winning the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize long ago in 1981. Music, and singing in particular, is not a competitive enterprise but I can see that some advantages can come from winning a prestigious competition.
Having said that, perhaps the best thing to come out of many such competitions is to give the public at large an opportunity to observe, at an early stage, the potential of some young musicians. Often it is not the winner who emerges from the crowd to go on to the great career, but another contestant. I recall a couple of years ago, in the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition (perhaps the most bombastic name for any competition), that my friend and colleague Beth Taylor reached the final but didn’t win. However, it is she who has gone on to forge an international career, and not, as far as I am aware, in the short term, the winner.
This preamble is to suggest that all our competitors on Tuesday were fabulous, and despite there being a clear winner, in the view of the judges, all four should do well in the future. A very decent audience had turned up in the grand setting of the nave of St Mary’s Cathedral for the final of the Director’s Prize.
The first young artist we heard was Connie Huang, who has been a pupil at the School since 2019. She is a superb pianist, studying with Helena Buckmayer, and her programme of Bach, Ravel and Ligeti was very impressive. A previous winner of the school’s Intermediate Recital Prize, she gave a poised and accomplished performance, which emphasised both her technical virtuosity and her artistic maturity. I was especially struck by her spell-binding playing of Ravel’s ‘Jeux d’Eau’ (water games), an impressionistic kaleidoscope of notes conveying an image of water fountains in a château garden. Perhaps her choice of three movements from Ligeti’s ‘Musica Ricercata’ was a little esoteric as a finale and was slightly unwise in the context of a public competition, but it was impressively played nonetheless.
Our second young artist was Aaron Jia, a 17 year old pupil, born in Hong Kong, and a pupil at St Mary’s since 2023, studying with Richard Beauchamp. Aaron has been playing the piano since the age of three, and is clearly already an extremely polished and mature player. He began, bravely, with an extended piece, ‘Black Earth’, by Fazil Say, a Turkish pianist and composer, of whom I must say I was unaware. It proved to be a fascinating work, based on a song by the Turkish Saz player, Aşik Veysel. The Saz is a sort of Turkish lute, and its sound was imitated by Aaron reaching into the piano and dampening the sound of the strings manually. The song tells of loneliness and loss, and the black earth is a reminder of the colour of the landscape around Veysel’s home town of Sivas. After this startling piece, Aaron moved on to more familiar territory with Chopin’s Ballade no. 3 in A flat Major, which he played with sumptuous virtuosity and brilliance. The ballade was inspired by a Polish poem, Undine, in which an unsuspecting youth is bewitched to his ruin by a water nymph. It was a mightily impressive performance.
The third performer, and a pleasure for me as a singer, was the young Scottish Mezzo-Soprano, Eva Smeddle, a native of my Alma Mater, St Andrews. Originally coming to St Mary’s as a composer (last year, she had her composition, ‘A Nightmare in Argentina’, played by the Glasgow Chamber Orchestra), she has added singing to her portfolio, and already possesses a very likeable mezzo-soprano voice. Singing fluently in three languages, she gave us an extremely balanced 15 minute programme of songs by Elgar, Hahn, Chaminade, Wolf and Dring. The only competitor to introduce her programme, Eva has a charming stage presence and really gave us a performance. It’s frankly impossible to compare someone with a not yet mature voice, who has been studying singing only for a short time (plaudits by the way to her teacher, Kate Aitken), with instrumentalists who have been honing their technique since they were 3 or 4, and so I felt she was at an immediate disadvantage in the context of a competition. She starts at the Royal College of Music in London this autumn, and I am sure we will hear much more from this young singer in the future. In the short term, she will give a lunchtime recital during the Edinburgh Festival in August at St Mary’s Cathedral, with her accompanist today, Anna Michels, who played extremely well.
The final competitor, William Guo (violin), was also accompanied, this time by John Cameron, Director of Music at the school. We had heard William before in a performance of Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole at the Queens Hall, after winning the school’s Lord Clyde Concerto Competition. He possesses a phenomenal technique, and is already a fine performer, although as the only artist not to play from memory, I felt he put himself at a disadvantage in the context of a competition. That he also had a memory lapse during his performance was doubly unfortunate. Nonetheless, he gave a superb recital of Prokofiev, Ysaÿe and Kreisler, demonstrating a splendid command of his instrument. He too is soon to move to London to study at a music college there, and we wish him every success.
Our judging panel (Susan Tomes, Jonathan Gawn and Nikita Naumov) was ushered into a darkened room to make its decision, while we were entertained by last year’s winner, Ben-David Zasman (piano), who played some Messiaen, and last year’s Intermediate Prize Winner, Shionka Kamakaji (harp), playing a Toccata by Nina Rota.
The judges returned to deliver their verdict, which was apparently unanimous, in favour of Aaron Jia, who is a worthy winner of the Director’s Recital Prize. For me, to a certain extent, the pleasure was more in the chance to hear four consummate young musicians performing bravely in recital than necessarily in winners and losers, and I recommend our readers to keep an eye out for all of them in the near future!