US violinist wins all-female, all-Asian Enescu final

David K. Nelson says:

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.

Davis says:

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.