Page 852 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

“Each of the 24 who come to the second round in Leeds will receive a one-
to-one session with a careers adviser, which we pay for, they will also have

sessions with Askonas Holt, one of the top classical music management

organisations in the world, and Warner Classics, who are also our partners,
with medici.tv and Premier PR, we will give them digital advice and help

them with their websites and social media,” Gatehouse explains.

“We wanted from the outset to be more than just a competition. When I took

over it was a big competition for three weeks every three years in Leeds and

in-between nothing. So we also felt as organisation we needed to do better
than that across the year in the years in-between and expand the activities

within the organisation.”

Competition organisers are keen to strike a gender balance at this year’s

Competition, with more than a third of the pianists reaching the second

round women. “In 2021, it was just an anomaly of how it went with our
voting system, we ended up with an all-male final,” Gatehouse says. “We

vote anonymously, we don’t discuss anything as a jury, but suddenly we

were confronted with the fact that from a semi-finals where we had four
women and six men, we had five men in the final.

“As a jury, we were all quite shocked by that because when we looked at the
voting it turned out that eight out of the nine of us had each voted for at

least one of the women to go through, but because the votes had been too
evenly spread – if there had been one who had got most of the votes she

would have got through, or even two – but that’s how it was.

“That set us thinking, and we’ve done a lot of research, we’ve spent days
consulting with lawyers and people who are specialists in gender equality,

and we’ve come up with a raft of measures which we hope will prevent that

sort of thing happening again.

“Obviously our first priority is to find the best pianist, so we’re not

imposing any quotas because right from the word go we said you can’t