In a Monday (6/24) story at Reuters, Barbara Lewis writes about pianist Boris Giltburg, winner on June 1 of Belgium’s prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition, “in spite of a memory lapse that froze him as he performed Mozart in the semi-finals…. ‘What I most wanted to do was crawl away, but I couldn’t.’ … He was incredulous that he was selected for the finals—and the next ordeal in the form of a week of confinement in Waterloo, near Brussels … to learn a fiendishly difficult new work by French composer Michel Petrossian,” along with his chosen performance pieces, a Beethoven sonata and a Rachmaninoff concerto. “ ‘I’m a bit angry at the world for not having come up with another way of discovering talent other than competitions,’ he said…. For the future, he said there will be no more competitions, only concert performances, which he loves…. Giltburg has a Facebook page and a blog to try to explain to the non-initiated classical music’s power. ‘Music, as a creation of humanity, there’s little I would place above it,’ he said. ‘I want to bring the same kind of feeling to everybody.’ ”
Posted June 28, 2013
