THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Monday, January 15, 2018
A Note on Bachtrack
Looking over the Bachtrack statistics for 2017 from the link I posted on Friday, I notice something interesting. If you go to the complete infographic and scroll down to the "Busiest Instrumentalists" section towards the bottom you will see a section on pianists. At the top is Dénes Várjon with 64 concerts followed by a tie between Daniil Trifonov and Yuja Wang with 57 concerts each. Conspicuous by his absence is one of the most active pianists, Grigory Sokolov. A quick trip to his website shows an impressive list of concert dates for this season, 74 by my count, which should have put him at number one on the list. Now why did he not appear? Another quite active pianist is Khatia Buniatishvili, also not listed and on her website I count 42 upcoming concerts this year. Yes, perhaps she would have been number 11 on the list, just under Kirill Gerstein. But the absence of Sokolov is simply inexplicable. So, obviously the Bachtrack numbers cannot be trusted...
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3 comments:
Bryan, I think the answer to why Sokolov didn't make the top of the list is that the results are based only on the events (concerts) that were listed on the Bachtrack site in 2017. I see that for the first half of 2018 Bachtrack only has 6 Sokolov concerts. Notably the site lists 23 concerts by young Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki.
Like all statistics, it appears that Bachtrack results need to be taken with a measure of salt.
I wonder why they only count a few of Sokolov's concerts?
Bachtrack is not the secret police haha so they don't follow everyone around. Events have to be reported to them for listing. The underreporting is true for most artists I think. So it is not a list of every public performance. Orchestras are more likely to be listed more fully than wandering soloists. I guess the larger groups are less likely to modify or cancel their events also. But if you have a temperamental artist vs a publicity hound there will be differential coverage. It is good for general rankings.
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