62 The Recital

On Saturday evening, two days after the end of the 12^th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, I went to Haifa to hear the winners perform. The planned event seemed almost monstrous: three recitals, each one an hour long, with two half hour long intermissions. That is to say, a four hour marathon. I only heard of the recital Saturday noon at a family get-together and decided that I would get there during the first intermission and hear the last two recitals. That way I succeeded in hearing the two contestants who were awarded second prize (as is known, no first prize was given).

Years ago, when the Rubinstein competition was still a brilliant novelty, I would follow all the stages of the competition with great interest. I would listen to the recitals on the radio and free myself for a day or two in which I would sit in the Tel Aviv Museum and listen for hours to the contestants. Everything aroused my enthusiasm: the excited audience, the nervous contestants pounding away at the piano, the judges scrutinized by the audience that noted every raised eyebrow or movement of a pen. Of course I also went to the final rounds in the Mann Auditorium and eagerly awaited the judges' decision.

This year I hardly followed the competition. I didn't listen to the radio broadcasts and even missed the TV broadcast of the final concert. Nevertheless I couldn't ignore the event completely and so it happened that before the final stage, I saw and heard live on a television program one minute of the playing of Ching-Yun Hu, and a famous young composer who sat in the studio, called her "a competition horse". I understood that she was also the audience's favorite, and suddenly I began to have doubts about her. My doubts turned out to be right.

Ching-Yun Hu, who is seen here in a blurred picture that I managed to snap with my cell phone camera, played the way it is usual to play in competitions, like an athlete, fast, strong and exact. I couldn't get interested in her playing. I didn't feel that she was trying to express something and her tone also lacked brilliance and beauty: as if she doesn't have time to devote to tonal quality as such.

The surprise that was awaiting me in Haifa was the playing of Roman Rabinovich. I feared that he had been advanced because he is an Israeli (afraid that the judges would insist on giving the prize to an Israeli because of the country's sixtieth anniversary), but from the first note I understood that a mature and serious artist was sitting on the stage. Without superfluous gestures and grimaces he creates an excellent sound and his posture at the piano gives the feeling of calm and seriousness. As more of the composition is heard, the competition and the noise surrounding it are forgotten. Roman succeeds in creating a barrier between the surrounding commotion and the main thing happening at this moment – when he and the piano meet opposite us in a world that is only music.