Maestro’s Musings: A Career In Music

Remember when TV used to have shows? Really good shows, like Hogan’s Heroes, and McHale’s Navy? (Ah, that’s evidence of a misspent youth.)

Well, you can’t turn on the tube nowadays without finding sports. I don’t mean just basketball and hockey and baseball. I’m talking competition…winners and losers. Millionaire, Amazing Race, The Apprentice, Biggest Loser, Cash Cab. Are you in? Do you want to play? PBS, for Pete’s sake, has the Antiques Road Show with its winners and losers. Aunt Martha’s credenza is worth $20,000;  your “Ming” vase? Sorry, fourteen bucks…you lose. And then there are the cooking competitions: Chopped, Iron Chef, Top Chef, and on and on. Pack your knives and go. (Now there’s evidence of a misspent middle age.)

Classical music loves competitions too. A cornucopia of concert opportunities awaits the freshly minted competition winner, who is both cheap and certified. You’re a phenomenally talented musician, so entering competitions is the way to make your career. The 1972 Leeds competition launched the career of the extraordinary pianist Murray Perahia; winning it in 1969 did the same for Radu Lupu. Top prize in the Queen Elisabeth competition in 1937 catapulted violinist David Oistrakh’s career, the 1970 Chopin Competition gave Garrick Ohlsson his shot. Ashkenazy and Ax, Perlman and Zuckerman, Neveu and Cliburn….major careers left and right have been built on competition wins.
But are competitions really so great for the winners? Countless competitions are held annually. For every major career that results, there are dozens and dozens of top prize winners who disappear from view. You win your big prize, you get a passel of engagements for the next three years. You’re young and immature, having spent eight hours a day in a practice room from the age of ten. With a pile of cash, a big ego boost, and twenty concerts a year on the road, it’s a veritable gauntlet of trouble waiting to happen. But the real trouble comes when your three years are up. Now you’re old hat, now you’re yesterday’s news, now there’s a new generation of young and cheap prize-winners to engage. Now not only do you have to earn a living, but you’re faced with the reality that (a.) earning a living ain’t easy, and (b.) you ain’t the hot stuff you thought you were.

You’re Nai-Yuan Hu. Ten years after winning the Queen Elisabeth you’re playing in a Broadway show pit. You’re Ronald Braunstein; you won the Karajan International Conducting Competition in 1979 at the age of 24. After initial concerts with major orchestras including Berlin and San Francisco your career has steadily dried up. Out of work until recently, your latest hope is to win a youth orchestra job in Vermont. Pack your batons and go. Worse, you’re violin prodigy and National Federation of Music Clubs winner Michael Rabin who died likely as a result of his drug use; or you’re Eugene Fodor facing a dwindling career after winning the Paganini and Tchaikovsky Competitions, turning to heroin; or you’re two-time Gina Bachauer Competition winner Tzimon Barto, recently arrested for crack cocaine. I’m sorry, you’ve been chopped.

So, do you really want to enter that competition? Deal or No Deal? Open the case.

Markand Thakar is the Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra; principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera; co-director of graduate conducting, Peabody Conservatory.