On Friday evening in Copenhagen, at about 9pm local time, Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark, awarded first prize in the Malko Competition for Young Conductors to Tung-Chieh Chuang, a 32-year-old from Taiwan. Live on Danish television, Chuang was handed a cheque for €20,000 and a vase specially designed by Eva Louise Buus for the local porcelain house Royal Copenhagen. He was then forced to conduct Hans Christian Lumbye’s Champagne Galop from sight, as is now enshrined in Malko tradition. 

The vase will make a nice memento of Chuang’s week in Denmark, and the twenty grand will have limited the financial damage of his night of celebrations in Copenhagen. But the real prize – as he knew only too well – is experience. Victory immediately secured Chuang invitations to conduct 27 orchestras, mostly in the Nordic region (where he’ll benefit from extended rehearsal periods in the Scandinavian orchestral practice) but also including the Munich, Qatar and Zagreb Philharmonics. One orchestra, a 28th, maintained the right to offer its concert date to one of the two runners up, but in the event the juror from the Vienna Philharmonic went with the flow and offered its concert to Chuang. 

In an age when the true value of competition victories is increasingly questionable, the new model adopted by the Malko Competition a few years ago is a holy grail for young conductors. Last time the triennial podium contest was held, within a few years its winner Rafael Payare had found himself in front of a raft of top-drawer orchestras and appointed Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra. 'I was just talking to Rafael about his win,' Chuang told me at the all-night party that followed the Final, 'and he said after three years, he still cannot believe it. He put it very nicely: this is very, very big.' 

But it also places a huge responsibility on the jury – this year chaired by conductor Sakari Oramo – to make the right decision. With Payare they evidently did. I reckon they probably have with Chuang too, but based on performances and rehearsals throughout the week, he wasn’t my favourite finalist (nor, incidentally, was Payare in 2012). With every second of Malko broadcast either on terrestrial television in Denmark or over the internet via its website, the pressure on the candidates was immense. On Thursday morning, the day before the Final, the six remaining hopefuls walked on stage in the full glare of the cameras and a paying audience, and each had seven minutes to rehearse the first movement of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto before playing it through to the first repeat – every word and breath rendered clearly audible in the hall and beyond by a headset microphone. That afternoon, it was the same drill but with a tricky new commission by Wayne Oquin. 

Chuang, in my mind, didn’t manage his rehearsal time as well as some of his rivals. He sometimes appeared a tad flustered and flippant on the podium. But it struck me, witnessing the jury’s patterns of elimination, that what they were looking for was potential – something that’s not all that easy to detect; which could be obscured by the ready professionalism of some of the candidates. Perhaps the jury recognised Chuang’s ability to get players on side. Each day, when he walked out in front of the hardened Danish National Symphony Orchestra, he tried a new joke to loosen them up (twice in entirely indecipherable Danish). At the end of a long day of semi-finals on Thursday, he hopped onto the podium and asked 'Are you glad to see me?' The audience and orchestra tittered. 'Well you should be, I’m the last conductor you’ll see today.' The titter became a guffaw.  

Approachable, pint-sized and wide-eyed, Chuang had been all but written-off in my mind when he came to compete against two serious Germans conducting Brahms in the Final. But he had saved his best for last. He conducted an imposing first movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, and without a score. Architecturally it was all there; more surprising – gripping, even – was this young man’s ability to dig deeper and deeper into the DNSO’s sound as the Brahmsian argument dug deeper into itself. I’d hesitate to use the word ‘commanding’, but it was a performance as commanding as a 32-year-old apprentice conductor’s can be. As Andrea Rebekka Alsted from the orchestra’s second violins told me afterwards, 'You really have to do something to put your mark on a Brahms symphony, and he did.'

As it happens, Rafael Payare came on stage during the jury deliberations and conducted a performance of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture that really was commanding – undoubtedly more so than he was capable of when I saw him win the Malko in 2012. Perhaps that’s what three years of working with patient Scandinavian orchestras that offer a week’s rehearsal and don’t have rows of sniping critics at their concerts does for you. Tung-Chieh Chuang, more than any other conductor I saw at Malko, set a personably atmosphere from the first words of a rehearsal in a way that speaks of his demeanour – something natural, un-taught. With a similar three-year experience programme, he might well turn out to be something very special indeed. 

And one more thing. My favourite conductor of the week, David Niemann, came second. But he did win one prize – the so-called Childrens’ Prize. Denmark’s state broadcaster DR and Nordic Artists Management who jointly run the competition opted this year to assemble a ‘second’ jury of children who don’t often get to hear live orchestral concerts, giving them the chance to name their favourite peformer of the week. Two of them trotted on to the stage at the end of the Final and, when prompted by the TV presenter, announced Niemann as their winner. As only children do, they appeared to have unique insights into what made their winner the right man (far franker and more acute than mine were). What an experience it must have been for them. One that, like Chuang’s, could set them up for life.