US violinist wins all-female, all-Asian Enescu final
OrchestrasUS violinist Mayumi Kanagawa (centre among the finalists) has won this year’s George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest with a performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’s 3rd concerto.
Second was South Korea’s Hyeonjeong Lee, aged 13.
Japan’s Wakana Kimura came third.
The international jury was chaired by Dmitry Sitkovetsky.
Is it still newsworthy that Asians risk their lives for competition prizes? Not at all. In Asia, especially in East Asia, the results of international competitions determine everything. From a young age, they are most concerned about where they rank among their peers, and their universities are divided into superior and inferior schools. Look, a 15-year-old won the cello competition last time, and now a 13-year-old. This is not a mistake of judging the whole by looking at only a part. This is an obvious fact and a current phenomenon in east asian countries. The competition to survive in each Asian country is becoming increasingly extreme. Those who do not have international competition results are branded as losers and will never survive. Do you think this is unfortunate? Or do you think it is the result of emotional abuse? Not at all. This is normal and everyday life in Asia. No matter how extreme an idea is, those who have been exposed to it since childhood do not feel strange about it.
I am not equipped to address all the implications of your interesting if somewhat disturbing summary of the situation — but I was struck most by this sentence: “Those who do not have international competition results are branded as losers and will never survive.”
Intense preparation for the top-level competitions has certainly produced its share of very able instrumentalists, of which there is no shortage. But looking at it more from the outside (with a distant past history as a record reviewer who was expected to comment on the recorded results of the best competitions — the Queen Elisabeth (of Belgium) Competition participants in particular were well documented on CD) — I find it an enormous mistake and waste of talent to use competitions to brand anybody as “losers.” Indeed it might be an even bigger mistake to label anybody as a winner!
And the reason I say this is because one thing became clear to me after just a few years of experiencing the actual career consequences of the violin competition winner recordings: and that is that way too many first prize “winners” have turned out to have so little to offer as musicians (versus violin technicians/ instrumentalists) that they sink down never to be heard again. You actually have to go back several QE competitions to find a first prize winner who has had a great career as a musician, but even then one is struck by how many truly fine musician violinists with good careers today were down the list — sixth place, eleventh place, laureate. And one sees similar results in piano and cello. There is no shame in coming in deeper down in the list, but if the prevailing culture regards them as losers, then that prevailing culture is frittering away valuable talents and, in the final analysis, wasting everyone’s time by placing too little emphasis on musicianship and too much on prize-winning acrobatics, because there is no demand for middle aged violinists who offer only acrobatics.
Stated another way, and perhaps a more cruel way, the music world of audiences and record companies and concert presenters and music directors is not obligated to regard as “winners” what this emphasis on competition results and competition prestige puts forward to us as “winners.” We’ll decide who the winners are, using criteria that go beyond being part of preparing for a big competition.
And this is not necessarily new, going way back to the violin school of Otakar Ševčík, who once lamented that no pupil had ever come to him for insights into how to play Mozart because as a teacher he was valued only for his ability to create huge techniques. Carl Flesch wrote that Ševčík was therapeutic poison. Only a few Otakar Ševčík pupils (Morini, Schneiderhan) got the “dosage” correct and became artists. The rest became merely very fine violinists and their names are lost to time. And even then I would not call them losers.
And perhaps that can be said of all violin competitions — too many “winners” have swallowed only the poison and in the judgment of connoisseurs are found lacking.
Well said, these stultifying contests have had their day.
Thank you for your explanation. Now I understand the reason why they play like they do.
Thank you for this comment. I’m sorry you felt it necessary to make such an explanation before the typical, xenophobic criticisms of Asian culture are even made. But good for you; you’ll probably be safer than many people.
Whether it is strange or not, it is still tragic that many people in Asian countries feel that they are losers because they go to an “inferior” college or play the violin slightly less well than one or two of their peers
This is patently FALSE.
Both Lang Lang and Yuja Wang never entered a competition.
Yuja Wang won 3rd place at Sendai 🙂
how come you rarely see black, indian, or middle-eastern players in a symphony orchestra?
How come you don’t explain why you felt it important to ask his question, and what “subtext” it’s meant to imply?
Because not so many black, Indian, and Middle Eastern people go to conservatories. And that’s because not many are interested to learn classical instruments. They could… but either they don’t get the opportunity or they prefer to do other things.
More money in spelling bees?
All Asian? Do you refer to Americans with European ancestry as Europeans as well?