An
Unsuspecting Winner
The Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz suspected nothing
when, while preparing for three concerts in Switzerland in late 2012, he was
bombarded with questions by the artistic director of the Lucerne Symphony
Orchestra. He had no clue that a recital he gave that year in Schenectady,
N.Y., was closely scrutinized and discussed and debated by a select few
listeners.
And he thought nothing of it when the man from the Irving S.
Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., sought a meeting
in Berlin, assuming that they would simply be discussing his next appearance at
the festival.
Instead, it was in that meeting in Berlin last summer that a
startled Mr.
Blechacz learned that he had been selected to receive one of the great
windfalls of the music world: the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, which is given
every four years to an unsuspecting pianist deemed worthy of a great career by
a panel of anonymous judges who conduct their worldwide talent search in
secret. The 28-year-old Blechacz, who has performed widely throughout Europe and
Japan, is the seventh recipient of the Gilmore prize.
“I was lucky,” Mr. Blechacz said of that Berlin meeting,
“because I was sitting.”
The award, which will be announced officially on Wednesday,
is often thought of as the music world’s version of the MacArthur Foundation’s
“genius” grants: a prestigious prize that cannot be applied for or sought. The
long confidential selection process aims to judge pianists over a sustained
period of time, in marked contrast to hundreds of other sink-or-swim piano
competitions that can resemble beauty pageants or reality shows.
With the award, Mr. Blechacz, 28, will join an elite and
varied group of recipients. He will receive
$50,000 in cash, and $250,000 will be made available to help him foster his
career. (Past recipients have used that money to buy better pianos, commission
new music, subsidize recordings and take sabbaticals to learn new repertoire.)
Funded
through the $100 million estate of the late department store magnate, Irving S.
Gilmore of Kalamazoo, Mich., the Gilmore Competition operates silently, like
the McArthur Foundation or the Pulitzer Prize committee. Past Gilmore
recipients include Kirill Gerstein (2010), Ingrid Fliter (2006), Piotr
Anderszewski (2002) and Leif Ove Andsnes (1998).
The Polish-trained Mr. Blechacz (pronounced
BLEH-hatch) rose to fame in 2005 when, at 20, he became the first Polish
pianist in three decades to win in all five categories in the International
Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Since then, he has had an increasingly
active touring career, playing concerts around the world. His recordings for
Deutsche Grammophon encompass much Chopin, along with Haydn and Beethoven
sonatas and a CD pairing of Debussy’s Pour
le piano with Szymanowski’s Preludium.
Blechacz is pursuing a Doctorate in philosophy with emphasis in aesthetics and
the philosophy of music at Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika in Torun, Poland. He
is writing a book about musical interpretation.
In a wide-ranging interview this week at Steinway
Hall on West 57th Street in Manhattan, Mr. Blechacz — a slender young man
with a mop of brown hair who very much looks the part of the Chopin interpreter
— spoke about his musical upbringing and influences, his goals, and how he
might use the award money for a better piano or to subsidize a recording with a
major orchestra. “I have time to think about this,” he said.
He was chosen from more than 100 other contenders by
the Gilmore’s artistic advisory committee, whose members over several years
listened to hundreds of recordings and attended scores of concerts, from
Kalamazoo to Istanbul. They used a password-protected website to share musical
files and their opinions, and kept their roles secret from friends and
co-workers. And while most had day jobs in the music industry that made it
perfectly normal for them to attend lots of concerts, some had to resort to
subterfuge at times.
Daniel R. Gustin, the Gilmore festival’s director, said that
he felt more exposed at concerts than his fellow judges.
“If people see them at a concert, it’s very natural,” he
said. “If they see me at a concert, they think, ‘Aha!’ So I do take some care:
I tend to sit in the balcony, and not get up during intermissions, and slink in
and out of concerts.”
He recalled a performance in Wichita, Kan., where, concerned
that some of the members of the orchestra might recognize him, he spent the
intermission with his face buried deep in the program. “A woman said to me,
‘Young man, you need a new pair of glasses!’ ”
Another Gilmore judge, Numa Bischof-Ullmann, the artistic
and executive director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, found himself with a
particularly good chance to observe Mr. Blechacz up close when the pianist went
to Switzerland to play three concerts with the orchestra. The orchestra
musicians “had begged me to invite him,” Mr. Bischof-Ullmann said, “which is
always a very good sign.”
So Mr. Bischof-Ullmann closely watched all the rehearsals,
arousing the curiosity of some of the musicians.
“It was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and I think that’s
a very revealing concerto to do with a pianist,” he recalled, saying that he
was particularly struck by Mr. Blechacz’s collaborative spirit. “It was nice to
see somebody who does not just come and think, ‘I can play this concerto, let’s
have a nice concert,’ but who thinks, ‘Let’s work on it and try to understand
it and make our own interpretation.’ ”
Mr. Bischof-Ullmann also engaged Mr. Blechacz in
wide-ranging musical conversations about music, repertoire and favorite
pianists. “Now he must be thinking, ‘Ah, that’s why he asked so many
questions!’ ” he said, laughing.
Mr. Blechacz, for his part, recalled discussing the pianist
Arthur Rubinstein with Mr. Bischof-Ullmann, and comparing the relative merits
of cadenzas in Mozart piano concertos. He laughed at the realization that those
discussions had, unbeknown to him, been part of the judging process. “I didn’t
know!” he said.
For another judge, Sherman Van Solkema, a former chairman of
the music departments at Brooklyn College and Grand Valley State University in
Michigan, the moment he began to settle on Mr. Blechacz came when he heard him
play Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor at a recital at Union College in Schenectady in 2012, with
several other members of the advisory committee.
“I thought, ‘That’s about as good as it gets,’ ” Mr.
Van Solkema recalled. “What I said at the time was, ‘I’ve never heard the G
minor ballade — which is something that you hear a lot in the piano world —
that cogent.’ ”
Mr. Blechacz said that as he has worked on his short book
about musical interpretation — which he said would try to build on the work of Roman Ingarden, the Polish philosopher — he
has been grappling with questions of performance and interpretation as both a
student and a performer. One particular performance of Chopin’s Mazurkas that
he gave in Hamburg stays in his mind.
“After the last chord, it was extremely silent in the hall,”
he said. “The audience did not applaud. And I felt that there was something
unique — it was the greatest reward for me from the audience, because I knew
that they were completely in my musical world.
“Sometimes, it happens.”
On the evening of the announcement, Blechacz appeared on Wednesday
at 5:30 pm in The Greene Space at WQXR, where he gave an exclusive
performance of works by Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, and Debussy. Hosts WQXR’s Jeff
Spurgeon and APM’s Fred Child interviewed him about his career. The event was
streamed live on WQXR.org.
Source:
wqxr.org
nytimes.com
thegreenespace.org
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