The fur is flying in Fort Worth!
At least, a glance at the heated comments on the Van Cliburn Piano Competition blog shows that people still care about musical standards, musicality and unfair judgments... I haven't been following the contest this time, but am still surprised not only to hear that Lukas Vondracek was knocked out, but that he'd bothered to enter the thing at all. I love the bit in the comments where he suddenly pops up and tells one of the commentators that before she starts judging them all online he'd like to hear her play.
By the way, if any of you read one of my colleagues in the Indy blogs writing "in praise of piano competitions" in which he said that the stories you hear about the nasties are "mainly apocryphal" - no, they aren't. We just aren't allowed to print the bloody truth.
2 comments:
It is silly and immature for a performer to lash out at listeners expressing negative opinions with an inane "well, let's see you do better" type of comment. Listeners do judge what they hear, have been for a long long time, and many do so quite capably. It doesn't require any performing ability at all, much less enough skill to do better than the subject of the criticism.
By the way, if you can't print under your own name the ugly side of competitions that you know, is there not some other anonymous way for the truth to get out? Just a suggestion, since it would be a healthy thing for any such systemic nastiness to get exposed to the light.
OTOH, we try, we really do... the problem is that they can hit you and your publication for libel even if every last word is true! Every piece I've ever written about piano competitions has been decimated by the various papers' resident lawyers. Now, though, there is a Facebook group called '10,000 Musicians Against Corruption in Music Competitions' which you might like to explore: http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=56071082765&ref=ts
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