“Of course I’m disappointed, but I’m quite OK with it”, Mohamet Hiber from France told us a few minutes after learning that he’d failed to advance into the second round of the 2016 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition.

After each round the contestants who’ve been knocked out are given the opportunity to receive feedback from the jury, and Hiber took them up on it.

“I talked to some of the members and they told me that I started well but it was as if I tailed off in mid-performance. I made more and more technical errors.” He agrees with this assessment. He actually enjoyed his time on the platform, but he knows that not everything went the way he'd have wanted.

The Carl Nielsen Violin Competition is twenty-year-old Mohamed Hiber’s first international contest and failing to make it into the next round hasn’t put him off in the slightest.

“I’ll go home and practice even harder now. I also want to gain more competition experience”, he told us.