Contending for the crown: Postcard from the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition

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The Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels is a regal building befitting a royal music competition. Designed by Belgian architect Victor Horta in 1919 and completed ten years later, the eight-floor complex encompasses a concert hall of sweeping cream curves and columns. Above the stage, concentric circles edged with gold project from the ceiling like a giant, inverted crown. Due to Covid, at last year’s Queen Elisabeth Competition finals (for piano) the hall’s red-velour seats were the competitors’ only audience. The year before, no competition took place at all. This year, excited audience members filled almost every chair, bringing with them a celebratory feeling of post-pandemic ‘normality’. They burst into enthusiastic applause as the Brussels Philharmonic meandered on to the stage, and then again for the entrances of conductor Stéphane Denève and the star-studded jury.

To see so many world-renowned cellists all together – Gautier Capuçon, Myung-Wha Chung, Natalie Clein, Roel Dieltiens, Anne Gastinel, Marie Hallynck, Frans Helmerson, Anssi Karttunen, Mischa Maisky, Antonio Meneses, Sharon Robinson, Jian Wang and Sonia Wieder-Atherton – was breathtaking. Barely had that applause subsided when the audience stood and turned to clap again as King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium entered the royal box at the hall’s rear to an orchestral welcome of the Belgian national anthem…