I read your article on the Van Cliburn competition. Have you ever competed in this competition? How do you judge the musicians? Is there some type of scoring involved. Be interested in knowing a bit more about the inner workings.

Avery Glashow

I never competed in the Cliburn Competition, and frankly, at the time I was young enough to do so, I wasn't ready. Musically speaking I developed more slowly than some of these pano lions nowadays! But the overall level was really impressive, very high. Of course, the one pianist who I felt was the most interesting and head and shoulders above the rest intellectually as well as emotionally was the American, Roger Wright, who did not get past the preliminaries.(www.rogerwright.net and www.mp3.com/rogerwright) He wasn't 100% that day, as he often is, but even so.... I also liked very much the suave Italian pianists, Maurizio Baglini and Davide Francechetti.


Competitions usually have guidelines which jurors are asked to read beforehand, laying out the basic procedures for adjudication. Many competitions use a simple numerical scoring process, assigning , for example, number 10 to the "best" performance of a work, or the number 2 to one of the worst, etc.; the Cliburn went several steps further, using a computer program to determine the results based on similar input from the jury. Personally, I find this kind of approach troubling, as numerical evaluation is not and cannot ever be identical to artistic praxis; there is no homology that can be engaged to link them. Thus I find it inadequate.

As I believe I noted in the article, it was in Sweden, at the Greta Erikson International contest, that as jurors, we set all that aside and discussed not only what we heard and how we reacted to it specifically from an artistic perspective, but also what we each felt was the ultimate potential of a competitior. We found in the 15 year old Viennese pianist Stefan Stroissnig a musician of tremendous quality and potential. Though he was consistently professional, he was not consistently persuasive in all the works he played for us. But his performance of the Liszt Sonata in B minor floored us, and left us with our jaws hanging; it was certainly one of the most extraordinary readings of the work I had ever heard, and my colleagues felt the same. And so we awarded him first prize, not because there weren't others who were equally impressive throughout, but because in that one work, in that one performance, at that one moment in time, he proved to be a pianist of the highest caliber imagineable, and then some -- he revealed himself, in the 30 minutes it takes to play the Liszt Sonata, to be a truly great artist.

JBY

[This message was edited by John Bell Young on September 08, 2003 at 04:25 PM.]

So the story goes that many jurists do not select the winner based on their combined overall performances throughout the competition but based on a single performance?

I would have thought it would be a combination.

Carson Bennett

quote:

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Originally posted by Carson Bennett:
So the story goes that many jurists do not select the winner based on their combined overall performances throughout the competition but based on a single performance?

I would have thought it would be a combination.

Carson Bennett

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Well, it is a combination, or at least, in my view, it should be. In the case I mentioned the single performance was so overwhelming that it would have been a scandal *not* to award that young man the first prize. In any case his playing throughout the contest revealed him as a pianist of the highest musical caliber. But that one performance of the Liszt Sonata transcended even that; it was, in a word, inspired.

I suppose my point is that it's probably bad enough that musicians of such caliber have to compete with each other at all; but so long as they do, and so long as that remains one of the realities of the classical music business, it seems to me that no one should be pigeonholed by any single methodology that might only serve to eliminate worthy, and sometimnes extraordinary talents. We should, ideally, take into account all the elements, including musicianship, interpretive acumen and maturity, technical command (which is rarely a problem nowadays in most professional competitions, where the overwhelming majority of competitors come well prepared and are technically secure), stage presence, and that perhaps ungraspable and certainly unmeasurable element, inspiration.

JBY

How many competitions are you involved in as a judge and how did you get started as a jurist?

Carson Bennett