Young Concert Artists is a New York City-based non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting the careers of talented young classical musicians from all over the world. Founded in 1961 by Susan Wadsworth, the organization holds two competitions annually, one in New York City, United States at the 92nd Street Y and the other in Leipzig, Germany at the Felix Mendelssohn College of Music and Theatre. The competition allows artists from all over the world to compete as individuals or in a chamber group, such as a string quartet. The amount of winners varies from year to year as there is no specified limit to the number of participants who can win.
Winners of the competition receive a cash prize and are provided the opportunity to perform in concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.. Winners are also provided with an artistic manager who tries to promote the artist through booking concert engagements both in the United States and abroad and providing publicity materials, promotion, and career development. Many artists in the program's history have also made their debut recordings through the help of the Young Concert Artists program.
Notable past winners include violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Ani Kavafian, Ida Kavafian, and Chee-Yun; pianists Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax, Richard Goode, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Christopher O'Riley, Ruth Laredo and Olli Mustonen; flutists Paula Robison and Eugenia Zukerman; the Tokyo, St. Lawrence, and Borromeo String Quartets; violist Antoine Tamestit; cellists Ronald Thomas, Fred Sherry and Carter Brey; French hornists Robert Routch and Eric Ruske; trumpeter Stephen Burns; and sopranos Marvis Martin and Dawn Upshaw.
Famous quotes containing the words young, concert and/or artists:
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)