EuroBob's Pick of the Week / competition

Concerto in E major BWV1053

Triple Concerto in A minor BWV1044

CD2

Concerto in D major BWV1054

Concerto in A major BWV1055

Concerto in F minor BWV1056

Concerto in F major BWV1057

Concerto in G minor BWV1058

I'd really appreciate comments from those of you who might be familiar with this recording or these artists. I just barely have a grasp on GG and piano Bach, and have little critical or technical familiarity with historical instruments and playing. But I plunked it on the Victrola when I got home and it shore sounded real purdy to me.

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One long-time f_minorite, since departed (only virtually!), is a piano teacher, and was getting increasingly bitter and angry about the intrusion of competition into her work with young people. They (perhaps with the collusion of their parents) were constantly pushing her toward repertoire choices oriented toward entering and winning competitions, in the same way my more ambitious high school classmates made choices about their activities designed to look good on their college application transcripts.

I'm not a piano teacher and not even a musician, but I am an artist of another sort, and this other sort is certainly not without competitions and their ubiquitously negative influence.

What, ultimately, are we concerned about? Searching for the next Glenn or Glenda Gould? (Apologies to fans of Ed Wood.) Competitions, however thuggish and intrusive, can neither create musical genius, nor succeed in burying, destroying, diverting or detouring it. Gould had such a clear focus about what he wanted to achieve at such a young age and how he wanted to achieve it, and such a strong personality backing his great talent, that he seems to have been largely able to transcend the corrupting effects of competition.

Competitions are a modern reflection of the miserable fact, constant throughout history, that musicians and artists need to make a buck somehow. In capitalist societies they have to scramble and scheme, play in subways, wait table, and back up Tom Jones concerts in Las Vegas.

I just had the wonderful pleasure of re-visiting Prague; I'd been there before in 1987 when the Socialist Heroes, with their machine guns in everyone's face, were in charge.

Then and there, if the government designated you a professional musician, you had a job for life (or for as long as you kissed the party's ass the way they liked it, which was counterclockwise). No worries about job security. It should have been a classical musician's paradise, free of the dog-eat-dog competition and recording contract environment.

And the result? In the few stale and dusty music stores and in the officially permitted performance venues, the repertoire was predictable, stale and moribund. There was not a musical surprise during my whole stay there. I heard no startling talent. (I didn't even hear anything uniquely horrible -- it was all the musical Eastern European version of Kraft Cheese on white bread with mayo.) Seeking out music in competition-free Prague was a dull, obligatory, museumesque experience. The only musicians who were having a thrilling time were the young amateur bands in the underground cavern discos who had managed to get their hands on electric guitars and were playing Elvis standards -- under the scowls and disapproval of the official government music program, but they let it go on because they desperately needed Western hard currency from the tourists.

Musical Prague today -- classical, jazz, rock, pop, hip-hop, tekno, avant-garde -- is a thrilling city, an assault of choices and flux, a community of equally happy musicians and listeners. And that's with all the corrupting, dog-eat-dog pressures of the new economic system.

Artistic competitions suck, no doubt about it. Who's gonna fix it? And how?