TT: Why music competitions don’t work

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the poor track record of big-money music competitions–and suggest an alternative. Here’s an excerpt.
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Boris Giltburg, an Israeli pianist who won Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth Music Competition last month, has mixed feelings about his victory. “I’m a bit angry at the world for not having come up with another way of discovering talent other than competitions,” he recently told a Reuters reporter, going on to say that he’d never serve on a jury for a classical-music competition.
Mr. Giltburg’s comment attracted widespread attention–but it shouldn’t have. The only thing surprising was that the person who said it had just snagged first-place honors in one of the world’s most prestigious musical competitions. Such high-pressure events have long been regarded with suspicion by serious artists….
What would it mean for an artistic competition to “work”? Van Cliburn was catapulted to worldwide celebrity when he won Russia’s International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, and since then his victory has been cited as the quintessential example of how such events can make a crucial difference in the lives of gifted artists. But Cliburn retired from the concert stage two decades later, worn out and burned out at the unripe age of 43, and most observers put much of the blame for his disintegration on the unnatural effects of his having become becoming an overnight superstar.
Even more to the point, Cliburn is the only classical musician to whom such a thing has happened. It’s been a half-century since any of the first-prize winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition went on to have indisputably major solo careers. And Fort Worth’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, launched in 1962 in honor of the Texas-born pianist, is notorious for picking gold medalists who fail to make it into the top tier of renown….
Mr. Giltburg’s complaint set me to thinking: Given their record of near-total failure to identify artists of promise, why does anyone still bother to hold music competitions at all? It seems clear that they’ve become obsolete, even irrelevant–especially now that the road to success for classical musicians is no longer as well defined as it was in 1958….
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Read the whole thing here.
A scene from the 1980 film The Competition, starring Lee Remick and Amy Irving: