I just finished reading David Stabler’s post about his experience on the judging panel for the Cliburn Fifth International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs in Forth Worth, Texas. I’ll be excited to hear/see the winners of this competition on video in the future – it sounds like their performances were all top notch. What was nice in this situation was a reversal from the usual results of the “professional” Cliburn competitions, where the precision wins out over the passion and musicality. In this case they chose impassioned performances of Beethoven and Liszt (by opthamologist Drew Mays) over cerebral performances of Rorem and Barber (by attorney Mark Fuller) – though I wonder: if the repertoire were reversed, would the outcome have been different?
I also wish that this format would be extended by other competition sponsors – say the Coleman and Fischoff chamber music competitions, and the Naumberg solo/chamber competitions, and the Banff string quartet competitions. There is a huge market of amateur chamber music and solo performers out there, just waiting to be tapped. The less-advanced set are already being served by a large network of seminars and performance retreats, but the very advanced amateurs are not really being reached at this moment – this would be a chance to give them something to shoot for.