When she was only 10 years old, growing up in postwar Japan, Hiroko Nakamura won her first piano competition. Then five years later she became the youngest person ever to win the prestigious NHK Competition, which led to an international tour the following year and her American debut.
Since then she has gone on to become one of her country's most visible concert artists and a judge for most of the world's major competitions. Last year alone she sat on the juries of the Tchaikovsky, Leeds, Busoni and Warsaw Chopin competitions and this week is doing the same at the 10th Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition.Were that not enough, her prize-winning book on the 1982 and 1986 Tchaikovsky competitions has given her a reputation as a writer. And, Nakamura admits, one of the reasons she continues to sit on so many juries is to give her something to write about.
Her conclusions are not encouraging. The behind-the-scenes picture she paints of last year's Tchaikovsky Competition, still the world's most celebrated, is of an organization in disarray, unsure in much of its planning and, given the political upheaval in the Soviet Union, of its future.
"The next one is to be in 1994," Nakamura says, "but nobody knows what is going to happen in the next three years, if Gorbachev will remain in power. And of course one of the purposes of the Tchaikovsky Competition was to make great propaganda for communism, for socialism, and, with that collapsing, it may have no meaning anymore."
Last year, she reports, competitors were so shabbily treated with regard to food and accommodations that one, a young West German pianist, refused to play under such conditions.
But that may not be the worst thing happening in the world of competitions today. "There are just too many competitions," she says, "and so many first-prize winners that they cannot get good opportunities even having won."
She also deplores the kind of playing the competition mentality seems to engender. "Some of them have almost become professional competitors, all-round pianists who can be good in any kind of music. In my book I call them `tourists,' or `competition hitchhikers.' Even before I listen to them, I know how they will play. They will have had very professional training to become good contestants, but that's all. They never will be extraordinary artists. People like Evgeny Kissin, they do not come out of competitions."
At the same time, Nakamura acknowledges, there may be another dimension to the problem. And that relates to her theory "that the performers of classical music, especially pianists, cannot mature easily in a society that offers plenty of other interesting things to do."
She cites the remarkable flowering in the last century of pianists from the remote corners of eastern Europe, countries "such as Poland and Russia, with their Josef Hofmann, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein and Horowitz." If anything, she argues, that climate was strengthened by the Soviet system, with its conservative values and stagnant economy. Now that is changing, and not just in the communist bloc.
"Now even the smaller Asian countries are becoming very rich. Besides Japan, there is Taiwan - very wealthy for its size - and Malaysia, where the young people have so many things to do, with many pleasures and an easy life. That's good. But to become a pianist, an artist, you have to have this hungry feeling which is missing now, I think."
And this year's Bachauer - is that feeling present here?
Well, Nakamura says, the treatment both judges and competitors receive is "wonderful, especially compared with other international competitions. Also the food." But in a lifetime of listening to these kinds of things, she says she has heard only three or four pianists who brought what she calls "an inspirational quality" to their playing, "and they didn't win." Similarly, after three days of prelims, she says she hasn't heard it here yet either.
But she keeps hoping. And frankly so do I.
Quarterfinals in this year's Gina Bachauer Competition continue Monday, June 24, at Symphony Hall, with the remaining competitors playing a 30-minute solo recital consisting of music of Mozart and Prokofiev; starting times are 1 and 7 p.m. The 10 semifinalists will then perform Tuesday and Wednesday, June 25-26, in both a 45-minute solo program as well as a piano quintet, accompanied by the Lark Quartet, also at 1 and 7 p.m. Then Friday and Saturday, June 28-29, at 7 p.m. six of the 10 will perform a concerto with the Utah Symphony, under music director Joseph Silverstein.
For ticket information call 533-NOTE.