Our first finalist looks desperate to abscond. Ashutosh al-Haq is thirteen years old, according to his programme biography, his origins in a Bengal village that his parents fled during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War. Raised, I’d guess, above a textile sweatshop, put to work with needle and thread at six or seven and redeemed, a little, by the old-fashioned English schoolmarm in a faded ballgown who led him to the piano. Ashutosh plays athletically and with reasonable precision, getting through his Bach fugue mechanically and following it with a Busoni reworking of a Bach chorale. What he lacks is incision and colour. He may acquire them in due course, but at this stage the boy is not a contender at the level I have come to expect. I mark him six out of ten for technique, four for interpretation, question-mark for character – be generous and make it five. Sandra Adams squints over my shoulder. A section of the hall, I hear, is roaring, ‘Zindabad,’ as if Bangladesh has just won the cricketing world cup. I suppress a woolly-liberal inclination to call the kid back for an encore, undoubtedly in his own best interests.

The next performer, just out of primary school, looks too small for his fiddle. Peter Burbridge, from the village of Oxleyheath, plays more wrong notes than right in the Sarabande of the Bach D minor partita and is almost too upset to proceed with his voluntary piece, Kreisler’s ‘Liebeslied’, with his grey, stray-haired mother as accompanist. I make a mental note to say something nice in my award speech, and mark the miserable urchin three, four and two.

With the third contestant, we have a winner. Maria Olszewska, sixteen years old, is Tawburn born and bred – her father an eémigré Polish engineer, her mother a North Sea marine biologist. She ripples off a Bach prelude and fugue in C major on the piano as if warming up. Nerveless as one of her mum’s nekton, she then plays two Chopin preludes and, when recalled by overwhelming ovations, a dazzling improvisation on the Beatles’ hit ‘Ticket to Ride’. This girl has got the lot.

Nines for Maria on my sheet and, it appears, more or less all round as we compare notes during the drinks break. Fred Burrows is ecstatic about the girl, and both professors, Brenda Murch and Arthur Brind, are itching to get their pedagogic claws on her. ‘We could admit her to the Academy, even though the admission list is closed for next year,’ they witter. I make a mental note to tell the girl’s parents to take her to Joachim Malkiel in London. All she needs is the final coat of high gloss and a knockout frock, and she’ll be ready for Carnegie Hall.