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:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
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—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)