Van Cliburn Competition Lets Pianists Find Stardom, At Last

If you took piano lessons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you probably fantasized at some point about being Van Cliburn. The handsome young Texan had a towering, wavy coiffure that made him look like a rock 'n' roll star, and fingertips as deft on the ivory keys as Michelangelo's chisel on marble when he carved David.

At 23, Cliburn conquered the best of the former Soviet Union's pianists at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, prompting the hometown judges to meekly ask Premier Nikita Khrushchev for permission to award first prize to an American. The pianist went on to become an international attraction who sold out concert halls everywhere. When RCA issued a collection of his greatest performances, it needed eight discs to fit them all.

I mention this because for many people of the boomer generation, Cliburn's playing represented a sort of ideal vision of aural beauty, a level that mere mortals could never reach, no matter how mightily they tried. That's probably at least part of the reason why so many of us gave up on musical ambitions early, or else gradually let their dreams slip away.

Fortunately, even as reality set in and careers, family and life's other challenges took precedence, some boomers and members of Cliburn's own Depression-baby generation didn't give up their desire to play music at the highest level at which they were capable. What's really cool is that Cliburn encourages them. His eponymous Fort Worth-based foundation recently held its annual International Competition for Outstanding Amateurs, open to anyone 35 and older who is not a full-fledged professional musician.

It's a competition that attracts people, from scientists to homemakers, from all over. This year's just-completed contest was won by a relative youngster, 38-year-old Ellicott City, Md., gastroenterologist Christopher Shih, who has managed to win a number of amateur competitions, despite only having the time to practice piano late at night after he puts his kids to bed.

But for Shih and the others, winning isn't as important as simply being able to play. Many competitors are retired people for whom entering the contest was the culmination of some long-ago, never-quite-extinguished dream.

Some Cliburn contestants have amazing life stories. Here's a Portland Oregonian profile, for example, of John A. DeRuntz, a 73-year-old retired mathematician and scientist who, among other projects, worked on thermal insulation for the space shuttle and also wrote software for analyzing underwater shock waves that is used by the Navy to design the Seawolf class of submarines. When he wasn't working in the lab or helping raise seven children, DeRuntz taught himself to play the piano. Here's a video clip of DeRuntz's playing that he posted to YouTube.

As this Los Angeles Times article details, another competitor, a 62-year-old Pasadena homemaker, Nazeli Atayan Rohman-Flynn, went to hear Cliburn play back in 1960 when she was a schoolgirl in her Armenian hometown of Yerevan. She went on to study piano at the local state conservatory and to play occasionally with orchestras after moving to the U.S. in the early 1990s. Today, she still manages to slip in some piano practice "when I can," when she's not cooking, washing dishes or watching her grandchildren. But as she told the Times, it was a thrill simply to get a chance to go to Texas and again see Van Cliburn, the idol of her youth, and to experience the passion for great music that she and the virtuoso share. "I love the piano," she told the Times. "It's my life."