What Was the Jury Thinking?

By BENJAMIN IVRY

In the murky, labyrinthine world of music competitions, efforts at transparency can leave listeners disconcerted and even flummoxed. Such is the conclusion sparked by the results, announced June 7, of the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas.

This year, for the first time, all performances in the quadrennial 17-day contest were transmitted live via Webcasts, and later archived online at www.cliburn.tv. Selected rehearsals were also shown live, although not archived for later viewing. In 1966, the Cliburn competition jury got it right when it awarded a gold medal to the great Romanian pianist Radu Lupu. Since then, the competition has more often resulted in odd picks, such as the provincial-sounding Olga Kern and plodding Alexander Kobrin, Cliburn gold medalists in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Yet nothing in recent memory has been as shocking as this year's top prizes, which ignored the most musically mature and sensitive pianist competing in the finals, Chinese-born Di Wu, but gave gold medals to Nobuyuki Tsujii, a student-level Japanese performer plainly out of his depth in the most demanding repertoire, and Haochen Zhang, a clearly talented but unfinished musician who just turned 19. Second prize went to Yeol Eum Son, a bland South Korean pianist, and no third prize was awarded.

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Van Cliburn Foundation/Altre MEDIA

At the Van Cliburn piano competition, Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20, gave an uneven, student-caliber performance -- yet still won gold.

Many articles have focused on the fact that Mr. Tsujii was born blind and learns music by ear. But only results count, and his June 6 performance of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with the mediocre Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, led with steely resolve by James Conlon, was a disaster. Soloists who cannot see a conductor's cues should not be playing concertos in public, out of simple respect for the composers involved. Promoters can easily turn musical performances into stunts, like the staged operahouse appearances of the otherwise cannily intelligent tenor Andrea Bocelli.

Mr. Tsujii was highly uneven even in solo music, such as a jejune version of Beethoven's "Appassionata" Sonata on June 7, yet the jury, which included the distinguished pianists Menahem Pressler and Joseph Kalichstein, as well as the famed Juilliard piano teacher Yoheved Kaplinsky, awarded him first place. Also on the jury of eleven were pianists not known for unfailing taste in their own performances -- Russia's Dmitri Alexeev, China's Hung-Kuan Chen, and France's Michel Béroff -- as well as such less-than-stellar conductors as Italy's Marcello Abbado, Poland's Tadeusz Strugala, and the jury's chairman, John Giordano, who leads the aforementioned dispiriting Fort Worth Symphony. Yet the jury's composition hardly explains its errors, which are all too evident if we watch the archived performances on the Web.

Texas boasts a number of accomplished orchestras, so why not give the Fort Worth ensemble a rest for the next competition and instead invite the world-class Norwegian maestro Per Brevig's nearby East Texas Symphony or the Dutchman Jaap van Zweden's Dallas Symphony as house orchestra in the spirit of healthy competition? Likewise, requiring all contestants to perform chamber music with the brash, imprecise Takács Quartet from Hungary did precious few favors this year to listeners or the art form of the piano quintet.

If standard accompaniment was so rough, can we be surprised that Bulgaria's Evgeni Bozhanov, a flashy, showily brutal performer, reached the finals, while Israel's Ran Dank, a far better musician who in a May 30 semifinal performance offered up stylistically astute versions of Bach Partita No. 4 in D major and Prokofiev's kaleidoscopic 6th Sonata, was eliminated by the final round? Mr. Dank's compatriot, the Ukraine-born Israeli Victor Stanislavsky, was given even shorter shrift by the jury, eliminated after the preliminary rounds despite an agile, emotionally engaging May 25 recital of music by Scarlatti, Mozart, Schumann and Ligeti.

Watching real talents fall by the wayside in such competitions (Australia's Andrea Lam, another example, was stopped in the semifinals) is part of what happens when musicmaking is turned into a public contest for career-advancement. Yet when the performances are put online for all to see, noting such mishaps is no longer mere second-guessing; if the jury has missed opportunities to praise the worthy, doing so becomes the duty of anyone who cares about the music being played. As if systematically, those performers with the most insight into the composers they played were accorded the least advancement by this year's Cliburn jury. How else can we explain Ms. Wu's deeply poetic renditions of Ravel's "Miroirs" (on May 23) and "Gaspard de la Nuit" (June 6) being overlooked?

Intensely choreographic in conception, these Ravel works were turned into miniballets by Ms. Wu, who combined assured, contained strength with high drama. By comparison, a version of the same "Gaspard de la Nuit" by Mr. Zhang, the gold-medal winner, on June 6 was excessively abstract, however ably executed. Characteristically, Mr. Zhang made his finest impression on June 7, the competition's final afternoon, by playing Prokofiev's percussively machine-like Second Concerto, while Ms. Wu majestically embraced the passionate Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, to no apparent avail.

Of course, gifted young musicians who expose themselves to the harrowing experience of competitions realize what they are getting into. The frenzy for attention in an ever-narrowing market can be overwhelming, and the results even more cataclysmic today than in a music economy where talent naturally rose to the top. For example, because no third prize was awarded by the Cliburn jury, Ms. Wu, 24, was not given the opportunity to record a CD sponsored by the competition. Yet visitors to Ms. Wu's own Web site (www.diwupiano.com) can already purchase a privately made CD of her playing Debussy, Liszt and Brahms with dazzling mastery.

One wonders if Mr. Cliburn, now 74, would have done any better had he, by some miraculous time shift, entered his own competition as it is today, in the guise of his younger self. He might have been excluded from this competition before the semifinals rolled around. A real talent, whose early recordings of Chopin's Sonatas are still admirable, Mr. Cliburn weakened as time went by and his career more or less faded out. May those real talents who are underestimated by the latest Cliburn Competition prove to be made of stronger, more artistically durable stuff than Mr. Cliburn.

Mr. Ivry is author of biographies of Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc .