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Sour grapes. He can try to be part of the jury next time. *wave*

It's a great idea as long as they can find piano jury members who are the equivalent of Randy Johnson, Simon Cowell, and Paula Abdul. Any suggestions?

Well, Elton John obviously. Stevie Wonder would be another good choice. As for the Paula Abdul equivalent, where is Liberace when we need him?

Could be modeled after Iron Chef, where they often have judges that aren't food experts.

Daniel

"I just read the WSJ editorial about the Cliburn by Ivry and thought he hit the nail exactly on the head. I also agree with Numerian's comment about the Cliburn results being criticized a lot more this time since most of the performances are easy to assess online."

Having the competition online was one of the more admirable things, in my view--- one of the big things the Van got right, and I'm thankful to them for doing it. The criticism was mainly about the quality of the jurying, with a sidelight on the Fort Worth orchestra's ability to hold up under an assignment that proved to be too much for them. Fair enough, and his suggestions of other nearby orchestras were worth consideration.

I'm less sure about Ivry's comment on the blind pianist's ability (as such) to perform with an ensemble. There should be some way to make this work out in a country with the Americans with Disabilities Act (even for Japanese competitors; fair is fair).

But Ivry's comment about how Heflin himself would have fared under this season's jury is cause for pause. He ends by wishing well to those who were worthy but passed-over. Nothing so negative about that; I would have to join him in it.

I read the article by Mr. Ivry, and at the same time was listening to the Rach 2 performed by Nobu, and I have to agree with Ivry. Although the competition is more than just one concerto, Nobu's playing sounds amateurish in his tempo selections and not much tonal control or variety in the 2nd movement. There are other comments on the Cliburn blog that blame conductor Conlon on the major miscues in the opening of the first movement, but there were also misfirings in the final big section of the 3rd as well. All in all, not an overall gold medal standard to my ears, compared to Di Wu or Vacatello. Zhang is very talented, but still a maturing pianist, not yet finished. Perhaps he is too young for the rigors of the concert stage as well? Hope he doesn't burn out.
I still think the jury was out to market a "hook" to the general, non-discerning public. For $$$$ of course, with any artistic inclinations on the side. Look how the movie "Shine" took off-- the general public will eat it up!
Regarding Ivry's comments on Van Cliburn himself, that was a little questionable. Most piano cognoscenti know that Cliburn unofficialy retired from concertizing, following an extended sabbatical. But there is some irony in wondering if the namesake of the competition could even get out of the first round of his own competition (assuming he was still playing in his prime).
But overall an insightful article, and a definitive critical response to all the bloggers so enamored of a blind pianists abilities, that they disregard far more competent and musically interesting talents.

Zhang must the most notably "not finished" 19 yo in the whole of human history.

Replacing the Van Cliburn jury ...

Let's use a market based pricing mechanism.

Set up a futures market with derivatives backed by future revenues of the recordings of the pianists' performances in the Van Cliburn competition.

The pianist whose recordings' futures got priced the highest in the open market at the end of the competition wins. :p

I think "not yet finished" is the new "doesn't put enough feeling into it".

The thing about bloggers, critics, and armchair jurors and competition coordinators is that none of them have to deal with the reality of holding a competition.

It's easy when you don't have to pay and schedule an orchestra four years in advance, arrange for jurors, keep the financial backers happy, recruit competitors, arrange management and recording contracts for the winners, handle ticket sales, book the hall, and produce internet and radio broadcasts.

I say this because I'm coordinating a competition this year, and I started receiving phone calls from people regarding the lack of fairness ten days after I accepted the position, three months before the applications are due, and five months before the competition is being held!

At least you could stop worrying about how many times you'll hear the Bm Sonata. But start worrying about how many times you'll hear Fur Elise, the Ab Polonaise, and the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody.

Where does one graduate to after the Bm Sonata?

Wow, took a while to catch up with this thread ... i 've been watching the main guys on youtube and still can't believe Vacatello didn't win.

It may be uncomfortable to read, but to me it seems more like a pragmatic assessment, rather than malicious in spirit. After all, Tsujii has said he gets cues from the conductor's breathing, and I'm sorry but that just doesn't cut it for professional work, no matter how virtuosic a breather the conductor might be. As far as I know, from their own point of view, conductors work pretty much exclusively through visual cues, which logically means they are going to have a nearly total disconnect with a blind performer.

On the other hand, there is a subset of concertos that don't necessarily require finely graded communication between conductor and soloist (mostly from the Classical era but including some later ones), so I think it is a feasible proposition to be working with sight-impaired instrumentalists, but only within a pretty severely limited range of works.

There's been a bit of discussion here about how much difference, in terms of difficulty, it makes to play the piano without sight. I personally think it's been wildly over-estimated, and sentimentalized much more than necessary. It just dawned on me - where are all the blind classical violinists and wind players, were the (purported) need for vision as an aid to placing the finger is basically nonexistant?

I guess that begs the question. Were there more ensemble issues with his playing vs other performances? I didn't see any of the concerto performances or chamber music.

Also, everything being equal, if Tsujii (or another blind pianist) is a true artist, does it not make sense for conductors and other collaborators with him to think creatively about how to manage ensemble work with a blind performer?

No. The ensemble issues are completely invented. There are plenty of pianists who never look at conductors or chamber musicians while playing. Breathing works fine, and most of the time in a concerto situation, you pay more attention to the concertmaster anyway.

The only major ensemble problem in Tsujii's performances was the opening of the Rachmaninoff, and that was not a sight issue.

The whole breathing/watching the conductor issue is invented by people who have never played an orchestra or string quartet. Sight is a lot less important in good ensemble playing than people think it is.

Fully agreed, plus let's wait for 10, 15, 20 years before we truly judge them. Could you remember the past Cliburn Champions 4, 8, 12 years ago? How do they fare in general publics' view now?

In the Clavier October 2007 issue, there was an interview with Jean Barr (collaborative piano professor at Eastman) she says one of the things she does with her students, like a piano/clarinet duo, is to have them play facing away from each other. This forces them to listen to each other and the result is they actually play together better than when they are trying to look at each other. Tsujii must be an expert in this area, since he relies on his hearing for a lot more than a sighted person does.

There may be a few issues getting cues from a conductor, but these would be minimal, and I'm inclined to agree with Phlebas that solutions for these places could be found.

Here's the review by Benjamin Ivry - don't know if it will take, but here goes:

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.

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 compose rs 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.

this was the article we're talking about, as the link was posted earlier.

as to Tsujii case, there's one solution however, i would think, that some day he'd just conduct and play piano himself for a concerto performace, like Uchida does. that would take away the need for him to get cue from a conductor. but it may restrict him playing certain Romantic concerti, while it would work well for Mozart or Beethoven.