 |
| Bruce Liu, on hearing he's the first prize winner |
The hardest part of the experience is recognizing that my friends, bless their hearts, by and large, don't seem to want to put their lives on hold and listen to four to six hours of Chopin all day every day, and I've had to go this alone. Not that my friends don't like Chopin; it's that most of them have lives. Some actually go to work.
No matter. I have been following the competition practically from when it started, nineteen days ago on the 2nd of this month, gradually gathering steam, learning more than I ever thought I would about Chopin and his music and watching the pool of some 150 wannabes in the preliminaries get whittled down to 87 pianists from 18 countries for the first round, then 45 for the second, 23 for the third, and 12 for the final round. By the time they reached the final round I felt I had a personal connection with all the contestants and - from the privacy of my room where I can choke and tear up at will - I began seeing them all as my kids. I picked a favorite - Bruce Liu - early on - and tried to persuade myself it was his beautiful hands making beautiful music that was the sole criterion, but I knew down there somewhere inside I was also being drawn to him as a sympathetic dude from Montreal, charming as he is handsome, and I'd make an absolutely terrible judge.
But picking a favorite among such talents seems crass, somehow. It's like being asked to choose your favorite child, your favorite dog, your favorite finger on your right hand. You don't have a favorite, in the end. You thank the stars you are not on the jury of world-class Chopinists choosing the latest to join their ranks. The Warsaw Competition is right up there with the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow that Americans - well, this American, at least - became aware of back in 1958, when the prize went to Van Cliburn. I was 18 years old and at the point of recognizing that my brief glory days as a pianist and organist were in fact never going to take me into the major league. I was always going to be an enthusiastic listener, always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Today I have absolutely no sense of having missed out. I am delighted that I got a good music education as a child in the public schools of Winsted, Connecticut. These days at the top of the list of the many ways my country is messed up is the way in which it distributes its wealth so badly that it keeps its military and its corporate executives going strong all the while insisting that civics, art and music classes are luxuries we cannot afford. I don't know how many others around the world and in the United States were glued to YouTube these past three weeks, but I wish the whole world might have put things on hold to share in this breathtaking adventure. I take great consolation in the fact that since these performances are available on YouTube, they should eventually reach a much greater number than they have so far.
I've always loved Chopin, but until this experience, when asked to name my favorite composer I would say Brahms or Rachmaninoff. Chopin was always a bit too much on the flowery side to take the number one position. I'm not sure I want to revise my list - the metaphor of having to choose a favorite finger holds in this case, as well. But I am humbled by having been exposed to so many more of Chopin's compositions into realizing I simply didn't know enough to be even close to making an educated assessment. In any case, I will always appreciate the fact that it was Chopin who made piano music what it is today. Nobody composed more - or better - for the piano.
What struck me most about the contestants was how young they are.
The twelve finalists, listed from youngest to oldest with their birthdays are:
Eva Gevorgyan - April 15, 2004JJ Jun Li Bui - June 10, 2004
Hao Rao - February 4, 2004
Kamil Pacholec - November 11, 1998
Bruce Liu - May 8, 1997
Jakub Kaszlik - December 23, 1996
Martín García García - December 3, 1996
Aimi Kobayashi - September 23, 1995
Alexander Gadjiev - December 24, 1994
Kyohei Sorita - September 1, 1994
Leonora Armellini - June 25, 1992
The average of all the birth years is 1997.8, which means the oldest, Leonora, just turned 29 this summer, the youngest three are only 17 and the median and average age is around 23. This is a competition among young folk, many of whom have been playing since they were prodigies. I think I can be forgiven for thinking of them as my "kids." On the basis of age, they could all be my grandkids!
When I began tuning in to actual performances, I listened to some of the 87 of the first round quite at random, and immediately found myself thinking, "This has got to be the winner." Then I'd hear the next one and think, "Well, maybe this one - he/she's just as good." And this went on and on, each new player wowing my socks off. I've never had this experience before, never listened to talent this conspicuous in such intensity, one after the next. I was hooked. Couldn't stop. Had to hear the next and the next and the next.
I needed a point of focus, and that became the contestants from Japan. I'm married to a Japanese, but even more significantly, I taught Japanese students, mostly undergraduates, for most of my career, and developed a sense of familiarity and affection over the years. The occasional rotten egg would show up now and again, but overwhelmingly I had the fortune of getting to know dozens and dozens - more like hundreds - of really great Japanese kids between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, for the most part. It was natural for me to see the twelve Japanese contenders among the initial 87 in the same light as I saw my students. Only here they were nervously putting themselves all out, showing their best sides, and absolutely shining. I found myself beaming. My kids were blowing them away!
One of the contestants, Hayato Sumino, I was already quite familiar with. I have been listening to his YouTube videos for several years now. He's a bit of a showboat, but his brilliance never fails to get your attention. He's very versatile, does jazz piano as well as classical, plays around, even playing duets with himself on the Steinway and a toy piano simultaneously, and although I began tuning out when he got overly chummy (and I think intellectually lazy) with his fans, I never stopped tuning in when he played seriously. I had a contestant to root for.
In time, however, I began to realize there were other Japanese that could more than match him. Kyohei Sorita first caught my attention, then Aimi Kobayashi. When these two made the finalist list and Hayato (who goes by the nickname "Cateen") didn't, I realized I was using YouTube as a filter without a lot of justification. Young talent commonly fail to get the attention it deserves. Kyohei and Aimi are well known in Japan, it turns out. Just not by me. And there in a nutshell is sufficient reason for holding competitions like this one in Warsaw. These kids need to be put on stage and heard perform. If I could go back in time, I would attend the Hamamatsu and Sendai competitions in Japan as well as any others within reach over the years.
By the time the twelve finalists got to perform, I had had time to expand beyond the Japanese contestants. I was now familiar with Leonora, from Italy, with Alexander from the border town and his dual Slovenian-Italian identity, the Spaniard, Martín García García, who delighted me no end with the way he bounced in his seat, tossed his head back and forth and hummed along. I remember reading about how Glenn Gould used to hum unconsciously along with his playing and engineers making recordings of his performances frequently had to stop him and start over. It was a bit annoying when I first saw Martín do the same thing, but this quickly turned into something too charming for words. How could you fail to appreciate an artist so into his own playing that he can't stop singing along?
Other trivia caught my attention. Like how many East Asians were present. In my own lifetime, I remember (in about 1970) NHK putting programs on television instructing audiences how to applaud. I found this hilarious, and maybe a bit embarrassing. But more recently a friend invited me over to hear Chinese audiences learning to appreciate Western classical music, and I realize how recently Asians have started breaking into the field, and how they are taking (have taken) it over with a vengeance. I mean that positively. It's hardly a hostile takeover; they're adding so much to what Europeans and Americans have called their own cultural possession for centuries and have made it truly universal. And I have to mention, along that line, that half of the twelve finalists are East Asian, ethnically, and that the two Canadians among the finalists are both ethnically Chinese - and one of them, Bruce Liu, is the gold prize winner. Bruce was born in Paris and raised in Montreal, and one has to add "cosmopolitan" to the list of adjectives he might use in boasting about himself, if he were so inclined. They tell me he is not so inclined.
While I'm chuffed as hell that Bruce won first prize (those hands! how could you not love those hands!) I'm also aware that were he not in the contest Kyohei Sorita would surely have won it. Luck of the draw. It's always that way. When you leave the judging of world-class performances in the hands of judges, no matter how sharp their powers of observation, it's always a subjective decision. I trust Kyohei - and Aimi as well - are just getting started, and I've got people to watch closely in the years to come.
Don't know how many years I have left.
I'm glad I lived long enough to have had this, my very own Chopin music camp, in the privacy of my bedroom, where I could choke up and tear up, and stifle sobs - long ago having learned that I don't cry that much with grief, and not at all with sadness. But beauty opens the ducts like nobody's business.
What a couple of weeks!
*I posted my last blog entry under the mixed English-Polish title of Chopinowski Competition. I thought this time I'd go all the way.
photo credit
1 comment:
Bruce calls French his first language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm917xB3ikE
Post a Comment