Criticism
One newspaper columnist, Benjamin Irvy, has written in the Wall Street Journal that the Van Cliburn competition was a well run piano competition when it started in 1962. In 1966 it selected the talented Radu Lupu as gold medal winner. Since then, however, the jury in the competition "has more often resulted in odd picks", including Olga Kern and Alexander Kobrin, who respectively won in 2001 and 2005. Irvy contends that the recent picks chosen in 2009, gold medalists Haochen Zhang and Nobuyuki Tsujii, ignored Di Wu, "the most musically mature and sensitive pianist competing in the finals". Yeol Eum Son took second prize and the jury did not award a third place contestant. Irvy criticized that requiring every competitor in the 2009 competition to play chamber music with the "brash" and "imprecise" Takács Quartet from Hungary did "precious few favors" for quintet listeners. Since no third prize was awarded in the 2009 competition, an additional contestant was not given opportunity to make a CD recording sponsored by the competition. Finally, Irvy questions whether Van Cliburn himself, now 74, would have been able to win under the current rules and standards for selecting a winner. The Van Cliburn competition, according to Irvy, has turned into an opportunity for career-advancement.
Read more about this topic: Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)