Notes from The Cliburn

See you in Fort Worth

Sergie Prokofiev has long been a favorite composer among Cliburn hopefuls, because the Russian's music allows pianists ample opportunity to demonstrate that they can play loud and fast. In the opening recital of Tuesday's New York auditions, Juilliard student Sara Daneshpour, played Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7, and yes, left no doubt she can play loud and fast.

But it is the the quieter passages that the kind of music-making and artistry the judges are looking for can emerge. Daneshpour's heartbreaking performance of a piece by Enrique Granados on Tuesday was a case in point. It was called, appropriately enough, El amor y muerte, or, Love and Death. 

 

 

"That piece is really interesting," the 25-year-old daughter of Iranian immigrants said after she finished. "It's all about the pain and anguish of losing someone and the ecstacy of the moments you had with them. It goes from hot to cold and cold to hot. Your suddenly highest of the highs, and then you just plunge," she said.

That fairly described emotions of her audience on Tuesday, and the most effective passages were not those that required her fingers to move fast, but those in which she barely touched the keys, producing a feather-like sound that wafted toward the ceiling the Caspary Auditorium.

It was the work of a terrific young artist, a seminfinalist at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow two years ago. I really hope to hear her again in Fort Worth. I'm quite confident I will. 

 

Our friend Van

As they have for each of the last three Cliburn competitions, Richard Casper and his wife, Elizabeth Carr, made the trip from Cape Cod to New York for the East Coast auditions. As was the case with many others in the audience on Monday at Rockefeller University, both are pianists themselves.

But their affinity for the Cliburn goes much deeper than a love of the instrument. It dates to a time well before the competition even existed, to the 1950s at the Juilliard School when Casper and Van Cliburn himself were classmates in the piano department.

"I met him before Moscow when he was just the most talented kid at Juilliard, instead of the most famous pianist in the world," Casper said, referring to Cliburn's 1958 triumph at the Tchaikovsky Competition at the height of the Cold War. "He was just a good guy. He might have been the nicest guy at Juilliard, somebody you could trust in what I would call a hypercompetitive environment.

"People were always glad to find something bad to say about somebody," Casper said. "Van never had anything bad to say about anyone, or anything good to say about himself."

Said Elizabeth: "He was just a wonderful colleague to all pianists. He never changed. He was always the same. Whether there were a thousand miles and a year between us. When we would see him, it was as if no time had past. It was just this embrace of people."

Casper and Carr, as music lovers around the world, were greatly sad to hear last year of Cliburn's advanced bone cancer.

"We love him," Carr said.

More on their friendship in Wednesday's Star-Telegram.

 

Like the Olympics

On a rainy, slushy New York morning, Jeanette Aufiero fought the traffic from her family's home in New Jersey, then a devilishy difficult sonata by Prokofiev.

Then it was done. The 26-year-old pianist who studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, had successfully completed a New York audition for the 2013 Cliburn International Piano Competition.

"This is huge. It's like telling someone you auditioned for the Olympics," she said in the lobby of the Caspary Auditorium at Rockefeller University. "The Cliburn is the Olympics of piano, at least that's how I think of it.

"Yeah, check one off the bucket list," she said. "At least I tried. Whatever happens from here on out, at least I can say I did it."

She was the second pianist to perform here on Monday, one of more than 30 pianists who will audition in New York between now and Saturday. Five jurors will select 30 of the 133 pianists from around the world for the prestigious competition that begins in Fort Worth in May. 

A crowd of about 50 piano afficianado's attended the first session of auditions, drawn to Rockefeller University by the Cliburn's reputation for excellence.

"I don't know how jurors can hold one performance in their minds in light the the next one that comes right away and is just as astonishing," said New Yorker Norma Mandelstam, 76. "I've heard other Cliburn winners over the years. The people who have won are just wonderful. This is the future of classical music.