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丰田公司赞助，日本人终于赢得老柴第一。见特别报道，可欣赏视频：
Postlude to the Tchaikovsky
Published: Jul. 3, 2007 at 4:02 PM
By: Eugene Chan (from Burnaby, Canada)
So, Mayuko Kamio won the Tchaikovsky competition's violin section, and nobody I know seems terribly surprised.
And it's not because she played miles ahead of her competition, although I happen to think she played exceptionally well. No, it's more of the usual: Kamio's teacher is the eminent Zakhar Bron, who happened to be on the jury. Toyota, a Japanese company, is the competition's main sponsor. Of course Kamio "won". If you looked at YouTube, you'd think Kamio was the most unpopular winner in the competition's history.
“ Kamio has the potential to become the most successful Tchaikovsky winner—in any discipline—since Ilya Kaler … and yet we’re still talking about Zakhar Bron. ”
Now, aside from the fact that I think Toyota has about as much influence on the jury as my choice of underpants, I find this extremely unfortunate. Kamio has the potential to become the most successful Tchaikovsky winner—in any discipline—since Ilya Kaler completed his sweep of the Paganini, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky competitions in 1986, a feat that has yet to be equalled. And yet we're still talking about Zakhar Bron.
Not that anybody could be faulted for dwelling on Bron's membership in the jury. Even before the competition, a Russian classical music forum held a discussion about the impartiality of the violin jury. "As long as [Oleg] Krysa and Bron sit on the jury," declared one opinion, "there will be no objectivity."
And most competition watchers would be forgiven for being suspicious from the beginning. Many previous Tchaikovsky competitions did not pass without some major controversy. Piano jury chairman Nikolai Petrov was even more blunt in an interview before the competition: "The competition has lost ninety percent of its renown because of the shameful, fraudulent, biased and unfair behaviour … of jury members at earlier competitions."
It's ironic, really, considering that the Tchaikovsky competition was started at the height of the Cold War to demonstrate Soviet cultural superiority. The story is moderately well known in music circles: Soviet plans were derailed by a Texan by the name of Van Cliburn, and the judges were compelled to ask Premier Nikita Khrushchev for permission to award the first prize to an American. "Is he the best?" replied Khruschev, according to legend, "Then give him the prize!"
(Cliburn returned home as a national hero, and the jury never made that mistake again.)
Fast forward several decades, and the Soviets have fallen. Suspicion about politics around the Tchaikovsky competition, however, is just as prevalent as suspicion about steroids, blood doping, and human growth hormone at the Tour de France: nearly all the winners are presumed guilty until the lab results show otherwise, and even then that doesn't clear things up completely. As for "innocent", there is no such thing anymore: there is only "guilty" and "couldn't catch them".
The thing that differentiates the Tchaikovsky competition from the Tour de France, however, is that cheating at a cycling competition, by its very nature, precludes one from being the best cyclist. But one can still be the best violinist even if one has a teacher on the jury. It's not as if Kamio was the only competitor receiving instruction from a jury member, either. Thirteen competitors, or over a third of the field, listed a teacher on the jury in the competition programme. Of those thirteen, seven were eliminated in the first cut.
I don't claim that Kamio was the best. I don't claim she wasn't, either; as just about everybody knows, I have hardly the expertise to make such bold statements. All I know is that I enjoyed Kamio's performance to the point of loving it.
Certainly, things could be better. The Tchaikovsky competition could be more like the one named for the Tchaikovsky's most famous winner: in 2005, when seven of Yoheved Kaplinsky's students were selected to be among the thirty-five participants in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, Kaplinsky asked to be relieved of her position as a competition juror, saying that it would be in the competition's best interests.
But the world has seen plenty of conspiracy theories already. Apollo didn't land on the moon. The World Trade Center fell due to a controlled demolition. And, of course, the Jews have been planning to take over the world seemingly forever.
Conspiracy theories are unbelievably useful. They let us believe pretty much anything we want to believe. I'm just not sure we need any more of them.
http://www.violinist.com/blog/theProject/20077/7216/  |
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发表于 2007-7-4 14:32:00
发表于 2007-7-4 14:39:00
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