February’s Camac Voice has been recorded by none other than the winner of November’s Cité des Arts competition: Maureen Thiébaut. It is the opening of the Sonata K208 by Scarlatti.
Maureen Thiébaut
Maureen Thiébaut began the harp in 1996. In 2005, she joined the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris (CRR), where she studied with Ghislaine Petit-Volta until 2009. Having received her Diplôme d'Etudes Musicales (DEM) with a "très bien" credit, she entered Isabelle Moretti's class at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris (CNSMDP). A propos - the CRR is one of the harp world’s best-kept secrets. Its first undergraduate degree - the DEM that Maureen took - qualifies you to then take the entrance audition for the undergraduate course at the CNSMDP. This can be very handy to remember if you cannot immediately apply to the CNSM because you do not speak French, and / or haven’t done solfège: you have to pass exams in both before you may proceed to the harp audition. The results speak for themselves: of the seven candidates to make the CNSM audition’s final in 2010, five with Ghislaine’s students from the CRR. Harpblog has covered this subject before, in “Studying in...Paris”.
Back to Maureen: as well as winning first prize and the Louise Charpentier prize in the Cité des Arts of Paris competition in November 2011, Maureen also won third prize and the "coup de coeur" prize at the Martine Géliot International Competition in 2008. She is principal harpist with the Manifesto Orchestra, and has also worked with the Paris Opera (2011), the Orchestre des Siècles (2010), and the Orchestre Prométhée (2008). She performs regular solo recitals, and teaches at the Animathèque MJC in Sceaux.
The number of harp competitions has exploded in recent years, meaning that harp students prepare and focus on them more than ever before. As sponsors, we also attend more competitions than ever before, and - more than ever before - one notices the difference between candidates who have approached a competition wisely, and those who haven’t. But what is this “wisely”? Perceptively, Maureen points out that doing a competition is not like filling out a form, either correctly or incorrectly: “I would never presume to lecture harpists on how exactly to win a competition, because each person prepares in their own way, and has his own reasons for doing a competition.”
Despite the variety in individual competition preparation and reasons for doing it, nonetheless it is clear that you must prepare carefully, and you do have to have reasons. Fact: if you aren’t ready, you’ll not win a serious competition. Even if nobody else as good as you turns up, I’ve never met a harp jury that forgives insufficient preparation, and prizes can be and are withheld all the time. In an article by Adrienne Bridgewater in the January / February 2010 edition of Harp Column Magazine, her entire interviewed panel of competition winners emphasise their preparation: “Our panel said they began anywhere from as soon as the repertoire list was published to seven months before the competition. ‘At the last minute’ was not an answer we heard from the group.” Sam Karlinski, who writes a detailed and helpful blog about competition preparation, offers a year’s timeline in the same article. For the biggest competitions, the repertoire lists usually come out two years in advance, and there is a reason why they do.
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