This article disturbed me greatly when I first came across it in 2010.  It was written, it seems to me, by a writer infatuated with pianist Di Wu, one of the six finalists in the 2009 Competition.  The writer, who was actually a professional, established writer, vented his anger by disparaging Nobu, the Cliburn Competition, and the competition's jury.  The article caused a firestorm of protests, and it turned out that the writer was not even physically present at the competition but apparently based his remarks on his viewing of the webcasts.

I created this page in 2014 when it occurred to me that the posting is of historic interest.

In the Fray

What Was the Jury Thinking?

By Benjamin Ivry

Updated June 10, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

The Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124458728669699751

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.

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

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.

More

From the Journal's Speakeasy blog:

• • Blind Pianist Competes At Cliburn

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 .

Comments posted with the article

David Turner Dec 12, 2012

I think with certain exceptions, the opinions presented in this article have been supported by the performances of the winners (and non-winners) in the years which have followed.) I attended the compentition -- every round, every performance and Nobu was, as described, a "student level" pianist. He achieves much -- much more than I could with the same handicap -- but this is about music. His subsequent recitals have been recieved with fair reviews for the most part and he now seems to limit himself to his native Japan where he is largely free of critique. He's a good but not great pianist who does no9t stray far form the CDs he uses to learn pieces. Listening to him is like listening to a player piano. .

Zang on the other hand has grown a great deal. He was good, and competent during the competition and in his subsequent perofrmances. Now he has a certain depth that I believed he lacked in the actual competition. I have to admit that the jury saw somethign I did not -- and perhaps his award was more on the potential he seems to be growing into than his accomplishment 3 years ago.

Di Wu is a wonderfl artist who did indeed get screwed. She came to the competition fully formed, and to this day gives the mose elegant concerrts. She is the real deal.

Yeol Eum Son of course won silver in Moscow recently. I've grown to like her playing more, but she's still not a stand out talent to me. She's very competent, and I think is making a great performer.

All in all it was a strange competition (the 4th where I attended all rounds personally). I wonder what is in store next summer.

Caroline Kraft Oct 25, 2009

I am glad that Mr. Ivry is supporting Di Wu, who may indeed have deserved a medal, but it seems that while he paid much attention to her performances, he did not closely listen to those he criticized, and I would like to share my opinion just as he has shared his.

I should say first of all that Van Cliburn did not weaken as an artist, as suggested. I heard him perform twice in the 70's, many years after his famous win, and on one of those occasions, he played outdoors for several hours to a very enthusiastic audience, and sounded much like his recordings. I am sure he could have continued doing that, but I don't see how devoting himself to philanthropic causes these days deserves censure.

I disagree that Nobuyuki Tsujii's version of the Appassionata was jejune. For the most part, it sounded comparable to many other performances and recordings of that piece done by respected artists, as did the other well-known pieces he played. As some have commented, he has an exceptionally fine and even tone, and is able to bring a strong emotive feel to a performance.

He also showed in some of his pieces, such as the Hammerklavier and Musto Improvisation, that he was capable of sophisticated interpretation. He seemed confident and comfortable playing concertos, and didn't have trouble recovering from the minor slippage you mentioned.

Haochen Zhang brought some originality to his performances, and the abstractness that you criticize might actually be part of that. I think you mean that he was able to clearly bring out the various voicing details in the music, what some called layering. A good example was in his Ondine. He might have a real chance at extending that style to other pieces, particularly those more modern or contemporary, which are sometimes abstract to begin with.

I did not find that he played his Prokofiev 2 concerto in a completely percussive style, but rather added much sensitivity to it. His playing was sometimes soft in other pieces, and it could be hard to hear his expression, but it was there. I had to listen to some of it more than once myself to hear that.

Yeol Eum Son I think was underappreciated because her music was not particularly showy, except for one or two works. Yet she picked some difficult pieces to interpret (Barber sonata, Beethoven Op. 111), and was quite impressive in those performances. She also made no extremely noticeable technical mistakes, and what she played almost always left one with the feeling that she had made it sound just the way it should.

I did appreciate some of the preliminary and semi-final performers you mentioned, but I disagree with your dismissive remarks about Evgeni Bozhanov, who I thought was an exceptional performer playing all of his early-round pieces with technical finesse and in novel ways, and also performing an extremely interesting and colorful final recital. The Rachmanoff 2 concerto that he did might have been his hardest performance for the audience to understand, for I think it was done in some kind of quick intense style that Rachmaninoff himself used to some extent.

If anything should be criticized, it should be that the orchestra and quartet were reportedly overworked, and that the performers were subjected to excessive publicity and feedback during the competition. Yet the competition itself should be highly praised for bringing so much attention to these deserving pianists.

I would need to do much more research to defend some of the other performers you mention, but the strong condemnation without much explanation leaves me suspicious.