Controversy Marks Tchaikovsky Competition

The ceremonies marking the close of the 10th Tchaikovsky International Competition on Friday and Saturday remained pretty dull affairs until the second evening's half-way mark, when Paris-trained Xu Zhong of China, 25, co-winner of the fourth prize in piano, launched into four of Claude Debussy's preludes. The packed house in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory clearly sensed something special from Xu's very first notes. Following his deft and thoroughly idiomatic performance of Debussy, their cheers brought him back for big, bold pieces by Scriabin, Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, and might have kept him at the piano for an hour or so longer, had competition officials not called for an intermission. After the intermission, much the same high standard of playing was heard from Paik Hae Sun, 29, of South Korea, and Vadim Rudenko, 26, of Russia, co-winners of third prize in piano, with works by Ravel and Tchaikovsky, and from Italian Marco Rizzi, 26, co-winner of third prize in violin, in a sonata by Sergei Prokofiev. Even though the competition's judges found themselves unable to name a first-prize winner in either piano or violin, or to award any cellist a prize higher than fourth, it seemed fair to say by the end of Saturday's concert that they had at least succeeded in identifying a few remarkable talents among the more than 250 competitors. The bizarre outcome of the competition gave a somewhat somber tone to the awards ceremony, which opened proceedings at the Conservatory on Friday evening. In the three instrumental categories, the prize winners' names were read out with a notable lack of enthusiasm, to say nothing of a certain embarrassment. Only in the voice category, where the four available prizes were divided among eight of 10 finalists, did there emerge any of the warmth and good feeling which normally attend the close of a Tchaikovsky Competition. Following the awards, the Moscow State Academic Symphony Orchestra, which earlier in the week had played miserably in support of the violin finalists, came on stage to accompany American Eileen Moon, 24, in a charmless and dutiful-sounding run-through of Tchaikovsky's "Variations on a Rococo Theme," and Russian Anastasia Chebotareva, 21, co-winner of second prize in violin, in Brahms' Violin Concerto, where accuracy and occasional fire failed to compensate for a lack of projection or rich tone. Led by its artistic director, Pavel Kogan, the orchestra banged away loudly and insensitively behind both soloists. No doubt the results of this year's Tchaikovsky Competition will be strenuously debated for some years to come. From the applause and verbal interjections on Friday evening, it seemed obvious that many of the juries' rulings failed to satisfy the audience. It was clear that both the audience and piano jury chairman Lev Vlasenko would happily have bestowed first prize in piano, rather than second, on Russian Nikolai Lugansky, 22, and audience reaction would surely have given the second and third prizes to Xu of China and Paik of South Korea.Among the violinists, Jennifer Koh, 17, of the United States stood out as the actual contest winner, both in the audiences' estimation and by virtue of her receiving all the available special prizes. Displeased with a mere tie for second prize, Koh secretly fled the competition on Thursday, leaving an astonished jury chairman Viktor Tretyakov peering into the wings for her appearance throughout the 10-minute ovation which followed announcement of her name on Friday. Particularly curious, even to some of the judges involved, was the decision to award nothing higher than fourth prize in cello, and then to omit fifth prize but bestow the sixth. One veteran of three previous jury panels cited the unusual absence this year of at least one truly outstanding player. Moreover, none of the contestants, to his mind, managed to play at a consistently high level through all three rounds. He seemed surprised to learn of the general feeling among both critics and the public that the best instrumental playing of all this year was to be found at the cello contest. A remarkable, but by no means unexpected, feature of this year's competition was the predominance of Russian prize winners. Just as Soviet contestants carried off the largest share of prizes in the previous nine competitions, so this time it was Russians who took 11 of the 25 prizes awarded. Two more prizes went to contestants from other former Soviet republics. The remaining dozen were awarded to competitors from the United States (three), China and South Korea (two each), and Italy, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands and North Korea (one each).Whatever influence the appointment of a lion's share of the judges from Russian and other parts of the former Soviet Union may have had on the competition's result, the real cause for concern this year was the failure to award first prizes in the piano, violin and cello contests. Perhaps there actually was a dearth of outstanding talent, due to some defect in the process of selecting contestants or to sheer bad luck. Some observers have suggested, however, that the problem really lay in the decision to fill the juries exclusively with prizewinners from past competitions. However distinguished (or undistinguished) their subsequent careers, they often seemed again to become competitors themselves when thrown back into a Tchaikovsky Competition. As such, many of them may have been reluctant to see any young upstart, no matter how gifted, come away with a coveted first prize.