The Cliburn Report 17: Les Adieux

Fort Worth, Texas

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The 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is now history and I’m winging my way home, using the flight time to record some post-competition thoughts.

First, I want to congratulate the Cliburn organization and the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau for making our delegation from the Music Critics Association of North America feel so welcome and for doing such an impressive job of catering to our every need.

Our Cliburn contact, Maggie Estes, was unfailingly helpful, as were all of the volunteers back in the pressroom. How helpful? Well, on Sunday night, a button popped off my sports coat on the way to the awards ceremony. Not wanting to look like a slob at the black tie reception afterwards, I asked a volunteer if she could locate a sewing kit for me. Within minutes, one of the mangers had located a lady identified as the “backstage mother” who repaired the coat for me in time for the ceremony. That, I think, is going above and beyond the call of duty.

The Cliburn organization also threw one heck of a party for everyone Sunday night at the Worthington Hotel.

CVB’s Jessica Dowdy also threw a great party for us at the Zoo, bought us a first-class dinner at Reata, and gave us a chauffeured tour of the Fort Worth museum and stockyards districts. She even took my wife and I to CVS. I’d heard great things about Fort Worth’s hospitality towards journalists in advance of our trip. Clearly, they were all true.

Seen outside Ball Hall Sunday

Fort Worth itself proved to be a fascinating city. Their downtown comes to life after dark with restaurants and bars, and we all felt completely comfortable walking back to our hotel after the concerts. Bass Hall is an excellent concert space, with good sight lines and acoustics, and conveniently located. My wife, the naturalist of our family, also had a great deal of praise for the city’s botanic garden and nature areas.

The Cliburn is a great source of pride to Fort Worth, and understandably so. It brings the world to Texas every four years and is one of the highest-profile piano competitions on the planet. That said, I found myself wondering what impact it and other competitions have had on the larger concert world.

A Cliburn medal, as Joseph Horowitz pointed out in his 1990 book The Ivory Trade, is no guarantee of a concert career. When asked at the Friday symposium whether or not he would offer a concert engagement to the Cliburn gold medalist, for example, Maestro Leonard Slatkin said he would not—but that he might make an offer to “one or two” finalists. Indeed, if you look through the list of prior winners in the Cliburn’s fat press information book, you can’t help noticing that most of them have not achieved particularly high-profile careers, and many left public performance altogether.

To a certain extent, that’s unsurprising. There’s no reason to believe the Cliburn jury is any better at predicting the future than any other group of professionals—including those who make their livings at it (economists, for example). But I think it’s also possible that piano competitions don’t prepare their participants for concertizing so much as they prepare them for entering piano competitions. In much the same way that our public school system seems to be creating generations of professional test takers, piano competitions may be creating generations of professional competitors, many of whom go on to careers teaching the next generation of competitors. It starts to look like a keyboard circle game.

That’s not to say being a Cliburn winner (or finalist, for that matter) isn’t important. It provides international exposure, and the medalists get three years of valuable career guidance. I just can’t help wondering whether or not the concert piano world is better or worse off for the many competitions that take place every year. It’s an unanswerable question, of course, but that doesn’t stop one from asking it.

The Cliburn Report 1: Background Music

Van Cliburn in Moscow, 1958

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As some of you may know, I’ll be jetting down to Fort Worth, Texas, in June for the final round of the fourteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition as part of a team from the Music Critics Association of North America. Although my live on-site coverage doesn’t start until then, I’m doing my homework by scanning news coverage of the event right now and sharing here what I see as the highlights.

I’m going to start with some not-so-deep background.

For those of you not familiar with the event, here’s a very condensed and superficial overview. For more details and complete streaming media coverage of the competition, check out the Van Cliburn foundation web site. You can also check my favorite classical radio program, PRI’s Performance Today, which will broadcast competition highlights.

The Cliburn is an international piano competition held every four years in Fort Worth. It’s named after the famed concert pianist (and Fort Worth native) Van Cliburn, who stunned the world by placing first in the Tchaikovsky Competition at the age of 23 in 1958. It was seen as a major cultural victory in the Cold War since no non-Russian had ever placed first in the Tchaikovsky and, in fact, it was generally held that the entire business was rigged to guarantee that result.

Cliburn went on to a high-profile (if somewhat erratic) career. His victory sparked a determination to create an American equivalent of the Tchaikovsky competition. Heavily funded by Fort Worth’s movers and shakers, the Van Cliburn competition made its debut in 1962 and is now held every four years. It has not been without controversy. Probably the most notable of its critics is musician, artistic consultant, and teacher Joseph Horowitz, whose 1990 book about the Cliburn, The Ivory Trade, makes fascinating reading.

This year’s will, sadly, be the first one held without the public participation of its namesake; Mr. Cliburn died of bone cancer in February.

The first preliminary round recitals won’t begin until tomorrow (May 24th) at 11 AM, but the weeding-out process of hopeful pianists from around the world began back in January and February when a panel of five judges traveled to Hong Kong, Hannover, Moscow, Milan, New York City, and Fort Worth to hear the 133 applicants for this edition of the competition perform a 40-minute recital. Thirty from that pool were chosen to compete from; you can see a complete list, including pictures and profiles, at the TheaterJones web site.

That might seem like an unfair process since it eliminates any pianist who can’t get to one of that handful of cities, but there’s probably no way to do something like this in a completely fair manner. Past attempts to use audio and video recordings submitted by hopefuls have had their share of problems as well. At least this way the judges get to see the contestants in a real-world setting with an actual audience.

Texas and international media are already cranking out coverage. I’ll skim what I see as the cream and post it here.