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TT: Why music competitions don’t work

July 5, 2013 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the poor track record of big-money music competitions–and suggest an alternative. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Boris Giltburg, an Israeli pianist who won Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth Music Competition last month, has mixed feelings about his victory. “I’m a bit angry at the world for not having come up with another way of discovering talent other than competitions,” he recently told a Reuters reporter, going on to say that he’d never serve on a jury for a classical-music competition.
Mr. Giltburg’s comment attracted widespread attention–but it shouldn’t have. The only thing surprising was that the person who said it had just snagged first-place honors in one of the world’s most prestigious musical competitions. Such high-pressure events have long been regarded with suspicion by serious artists….
cliburn01.JPGWhat would it mean for an artistic competition to “work”? Van Cliburn was catapulted to worldwide celebrity when he won Russia’s International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, and since then his victory has been cited as the quintessential example of how such events can make a crucial difference in the lives of gifted artists. But Cliburn retired from the concert stage two decades later, worn out and burned out at the unripe age of 43, and most observers put much of the blame for his disintegration on the unnatural effects of his having become becoming an overnight superstar.
Even more to the point, Cliburn is the only classical musician to whom such a thing has happened. It’s been a half-century since any of the first-prize winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition went on to have indisputably major solo careers. And Fort Worth’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, launched in 1962 in honor of the Texas-born pianist, is notorious for picking gold medalists who fail to make it into the top tier of renown….
Mr. Giltburg’s complaint set me to thinking: Given their record of near-total failure to identify artists of promise, why does anyone still bother to hold music competitions at all? It seems clear that they’ve become obsolete, even irrelevant–especially now that the road to success for classical musicians is no longer as well defined as it was in 1958….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
A scene from the 1980 film The Competition, starring Lee Remick and Amy Irving:

TT: Almanac

July 5, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“A partnership with men in power is never safe.”
Phaedrus, Fables

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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