Blind pianist wins international prize
Nobuyuki Tsujii, a 20-year-old Tokyo native, has become the first Japanese pianist to win a gold medal at the Van Cliburn international piano competition. Tsujii, who has been unable to see since birth and learned to play the piano by listening to recordings, is also the first blind pianist to win the competition.
Here is a video of his winning performance:
Tsujii has been awarded $20,000 and will go on a concert tour with the other finalists. He’ll also be giving a series of concerts in Japan.
Most of the media coverage of his win has been positive, focusing on how he Tsujii worked hard to become a world class pianist. However, Benjamin Ivry of the Wall Street Journal is not-at-all pleased with the result of the competition, calling Tsujii “a student-level Japanese performer plainly out of his depth in the most demanding repertoire”:
Many articles have focused on the fact that Mr. Tsujii was born blind and learns music by ear. But only results count, and his June 6 performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the mediocre Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, led with steely resolve by James Conlon, was a disaster. Soloists who cannot see a conductor’s cues should not be playing concertos in public, out of simple respect for the composers involved. Promoters can easily turn musical performances into stunts, like the staged operahouse appearances of the otherwise cannily intelligent tenor Andrea Bocelli.
Mr. Tsujii was highly uneven even in solo music, such as a jejune version of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata on June 7, yet the jury, which included the distinguished pianists Menahem Pressler and Joseph Kalichstein, as well as the famed Juilliard piano teacher Yoheved Kaplinsky, awarded him first place.
Ivry was also unimpressed by some of the other finalists.
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