Contests: Success by Short Cut

Time was, any concert soloist worth his cadenza had to spend several long, lean years on the road building a reputation. Today, budding virtuosos are rerouting their careers to take advantage of a new short cut to instant success: contests. More combat than competition, music tournaments have grown in size and importance to the point where there is a contest among contests, each one claiming to be more prestigious than the next. But when it comes to money, none can match Fort Worth’s Van Cliburn International Quadrennial Piano Competition, which offers a top prize of $10,000 and a bundle of fringe benefits that includes everything but an oil well.

Hoping to cash in on the riches, 47 pianists from 16 nations entered this year’s Cliburn competition. To begin with, each performer was required to play ten selections, ranging from the baroque to the severely modern. It was all severely worrisome. Rumania’s fidgety, fingernail-chewing Radu Lupu, 20, one of the six finalists, suffered from a case of “the dry heaves,” had to be rescued from the men’s room before each performance. On the day of the finals, he arose from a practice session and in his excitement cracked his head on a ledge protruding from a wall and collapsed against the Steinway. Revived, he refused a bandage for the one-inch gash in his forehead and, bloody but unbowed, trudged off to play with a driving intensity and the pyrotechnical flair of a young Horowitz.

Worth the Agony. In the finals, performed last week with the Fort Worth symphony in the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium, each contestant played the first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto and one of two Beethoven concertos. A computer tallied the scores of the international panel of 17 judges, but the announcement of the results had to be delayed while contest officials frantically searched for Radu Lupu. He was found at last, wandering the hallways, gulping air in an effort to pacify his queasy stomach. But the agony had been worth enduring: minutes later he was named the first-prize winner. The pressure off, Lupu celebrated at a post-performance party by playing Gershwin long into the night. “I am very, very glad that it’s over,” he said. “I don’t really like competitions. They are too nerve-racking.”

Lupu, a-student at the Moscow Conservatory, does not have to worry about competitions for a while. In addition to his first-prize money, he won a $400 gold watch for the best performance of Structure for Piano, composed for the contest by Willard Straight, $300 for the best interpretation of Copland’s Piano Sonata, the opportunity to play with twelve major U.S. orchestras, a three-month tour of Europe, a debut recital at Carnegie Hall in April, and a contract for further concertizing in the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

Now if he can only keep his stomach under control and steer clear of ledges.