Career Contest

"Competitions are the only way to give impetus to a career--until someone thinks of a better way," said Pianist Agustin Anievas last week. He spoke with authority: Anievas had just won the first annual Dimitri Mitropoulos International Music Competition--a brand-new contest designed to uncover talented new pianists both from the U.S. and abroad.

Distinguished instrumental competitions are not rare in the U.S.. but lately not even the tough Leventritt International Competition, which awards a first prize only in the years the talent merits one. has attracted the foreign talent that Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition drew in its first year (1958), when it boosted Van Cliburn to world fame. With world wide competitions getting increasing attention, the U.S. needs an instrumental contest with truly international appeal--and the Mitropoulos Competition is an effort to fill the gap.

Named after the late conductor, it was organized by the Women's Division of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York; contestants were invited from every nation in the U.N. A total of 32 pianists from 15 countries, including 18 from the U.S., responded. Notably absent were contestants from any Iron Curtain country. Russia explained that it would probably send someone next year, but needed time to "prepare."'*

Private Enterprise. The Mitropoulos Competition offered a first prize of $5.000, as compared with the $3,000 offered by Belgium's Queen Elisabeth Concours and the $2,500 won by Cliburn in the Tchaikovsky Competition. The scope of the competition was all the more remarkable, said U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in a final-night address, because the Mitropoulos contest gets no Government support. The competition is completely supported by private contributions--the first and second prizes were donated by Philip Morris International and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation.

The star-packed jury, which included Conductor Leopold Stokowski, Pianists Artur Rubinstein, Rosalyn Tureck, Grant Johannesen, Jacob Lateiner and Eugene List, had four finalists to choose from--three of them Americans, one Argentine. Winner Anievas, Manhattan-born but of Spanish and Mexican extraction, played the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, and he proved to be a pianist in the big, romantic tradition of a Rubinstein or Cliburn. Occasionally guilty of mere pounding, he nevertheless had prodigious technique and the kind of rhapsodic, deeply felt musical vision that suggests a major career.

Biggest Prize. Pianist Anievas, 27, is no stranger to career-building contests; he won the Michaels Memorial Competition in Chicago in 1958, was a finalist at Brussels in 1960 (tenth place), competed for the Leventritt Award a year ago. Will he enter the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow this spring? Says Anievas: "No, I think I should quit while I'm ahead." If he changes his mind, there is still another contest in the offing: the Van Cliburn International Quadrennial Competition, to be held in Fort Worth next fall, which will offer $10,000 as first prize, making it the most lucrative instrumental contest in the world.

* The Russians are taking no chances on letting their own Tchaikovsky Prize go to a foreigner again: in next spring's contest they have entered Vladimir Ashkenazy, one of the world's ranking pianists, who won the Queen Elisabeth Concours back in 1956.

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