This year marked the 40th anniversary of the quadrennial Arthur Rubinstein Competition, held in Tel Aviv for two weeks in May. First Prize went to 25-year-old Antonii Baryshevskyi, of Ukraine; Second Prize to American Steven Lin, also 25, and Third Prize to Seong-Jin Cho, 20, of South Korea. There were also co-equal prizes given to the other three of the six Finalists —18- year-old Leonardo Colafelice of Italy, Maria Mazo, 31, of Russia, and Andrejs Osokins, 29, of Latvia. As we’ve all come to expect, the level of playing was very high and it struck me that on another day, the order of prizes could easily have come out differently. In any case, a distinguished competition like the Rubinstein demonstrates just how many really good young pianists are out there these days. Now that the compliments (and prizes of up to $40,000) have been handed out (For a complete list of winners, click here: 14th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition Prize Winners List) , let’s get to the performances.
First a general comment. It bothers me a good deal that most of the competitors, though not necessarily the winners, seem to feel desperate to make something outsized of the slightest turn within a phrase instead of playing out the long arches that would make sense of the works as a whole, and the effort drives them to make eye-rolling, grimacing, swooning cartoon faces in practically every other measure. If this bizarre habit added anything to the performances, I wouldn’t object — truly — but the result actually is the opposite, and it comes from a lack of understanding of the musical architecture they are trying to project. Maybe this is attributable to modern life — the noisiness and constant motion, the demand for instant gratification from even the smallest things, the quick-cut editing that plagues everything from contemporary movies, TV shows and commercials, to the 140 characters of a Tweet. There seems to be no long view any more. Watching one of the competitors play the opening of Appassionata as her face reflected in turn solemnity, horror, sticky sweetness, and what seemed to me like amusement, all in about fifteen seconds, looked (and sounded) an awful lot like schizophrenia. Worse yet, these expressions are applied on top of the music like Halloween makeup instead of emerging naturally from within it, and these little titivations are so numerous and follow so quickly one on the other that they make no long-term sense. As we are further and further removed in time from the very unmodern environment that produced this music in the first place, I really wonder if we can ever get back the physically quiet and straightforward approach of the best artists of earlier generations.
And now to the performers: Antonii Baryshevskyi opened his first recital with one of the competition’s pieces imposées, Benjamin Yusupov’s Subconscious Labyrinths — a daring way to introduce himself to the audience and jurors. He took full advantage of the lyrical elements in the work and his command of beautiful tone did a lot to make the unfamiliar and often clangingly dissonant piece palatable in a way that many of the others failed to do. His Pictures at an Exhibition was warm-toned and the characterizations popped out in high relief. His Scriabin had an appropriately perfumed and slightly debauched aura, but of all his recital pieces I was most taken with the Schumann 2nd Sonata. It’s a slender and classicist piece, but with a wild streak that requires a relentless drive and very fast fingers and here Baryshevskyi really made you feel the wind in your face. I was less happy with his concerti — the Mozart D minor, K.466 and the Prokofiev 2nd. Both seemed to me to plod a bit.
I’ve heard 25-year-old American pianist Steven Lin often in the last couple of years. He’s always been an impressive player, and the technical megawattage required to toss off the Don Juan Fantasy, Petrouschka, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 and other pyrotechnic repertoire seems to come naturally to him. In this competition though, it was his Bach (the French Overture) and Beethoven (Sonata Op. 31, No. 3) which really demanded attention. His natural phrasing, free of the anguished twistings and turnings of some of his colleagues, sounded refreshing, and when it came to Schumann’s turbulent and passionate 3rd Sonata, all the blood and thunder you could wish for was there. His Beethoven 1st Concerto was grand and spacious with a humorous twinkle when it was needed, and his Prokofiev 2nd Concerto I thought edged Baryshevskyi’s by being a little more flexible and singing, especially in the broad opening tune of the first movement.
Seong-Jin Cho is a more puzzling case. He had a lot of fans at the competition, and the jury clearly thought highly of him. He overcomes the thorniest technical problems easily and has a neat and polished surface but, I think he has an insecure grasp of the rhetoric — the language and grammar — of 18th and 19th century repertoire. His BartókOut of Doors Suite and his account of the required piece (Subconscious Labyrinths again) were compelling, but pretty much all of the earlier music he played suffered from fussiness and the constant (and maddening) cheating of climaxes in an attempt to make them more dramatic. As with actors of a certain kind, you can see the gears working — also, like Lang Lang, I found Mr. Cho hard to watch.
There were a number of competitors who didn’t make the finals for one reason or another but nevertheless gave astonishingly good performances. I’ll mention two, although there are certainly more who deserve recognition. Marcin Koziak, a 25-year-old Pole now living in Texas, has a stunning command, but his cleanly chiseled sound and wonderfully natural phrasing were marred this time around by a few too many finger slips. He is, however, a real artist who I look forward to hearing again. Another is 21-year-old Russian Nikolay Khozyainov, who opened his recital with a meltingly beautiful Pavane by Ravel in which the piano seemed to have acquired a bow to draw out the melody with seamless legato while the accompaniment floated around it like incense. This young man is a master of romantic tone, amply displayed in Rachmaninoff’s First Sonata as well. Feux-follets went less well, as it often does, and that was enough to put him out of the running.
