Reflections on “The Cliburn” by Dr. Robert Smith

Many readers will be aware that one of the world’s most important piano competitions was held in Fort Worth, Texas during the last couple of weeks. In fact, the Fourteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition just ended last Sunday.

When one is in a piano teaching profession in Fort Worth these days, people ask you, “What did you think? Would you have chosen the same pianists as the judges did to win prizes?”

Without going in to my Creative Motion background, I tell them, “You know, the main element that activates the musical energy inside of me seems to be the one that acknowledges the difference between weight and force in the production of tone.  I can usually measure my reaction to the different players in the competition by their ability to lead me on through their pieces via a flow between light and heavy note balances.”  Now by that I mean, I tell them that some of their fortissimo playing will actually have a light quality, but at other times their pianissimo playing (perhaps in a Debussy Prelude, for example) might have a heavy quality.

That observation may not apply in the same way for all Creative Motion folks who were at some of the competition; and there were a number of us from the surrounding area who sampled some of the live sessions.  I hereby invite others to chime in on this blog with their own ways of measuring excellence. And of course, for any professional pianist – performer and/or teacher – there are many, many traditional ways to evaluate a performance, and those things also contribute to a thrilling result.

But how interesting it was for me to be in a place where I was NOT so awfully engaged by the usual and almost expected superlatives that surround international competitions: speed, accuracy, articulation, dynamics, the “right” tempo, etc.

Yes, I realize that all of those things, when they are done effectively, can be thrilling at some level. I personally envy anyone who can accomplish such feats of “wow” by exceeding anything I could ever even imagine doing with almost every piece of piano literature that I heard during the competition.

But I am so grateful for another dimension to listening. For me, I am linked to a performer by that wonderful figure eight loop of energy that comes through the “light and heavy” variety in their tone production.