Cookie & Pinky Come Through

The first prize includes a series of solo engagements with such orchestras as the Cleveland, Chicago and New York Philharmonic, so it is no wonder that the piano and violin competitions sponsored by Manhattan's Edgar M. Leventritt Foundation have helped launch many an illustrious career. Pianists Eugene Istomin, Gary Graffman and Van Cliburn and Violinists David Nadien and Itzhak Perlman are among the performers who got an early boost from the award. Since the stakes and standards are so high, the judges occasionally pick no winner when they feel that the candidates are not ripe for major concert appearances. In some years, no competition is held at all.

But last week at Carnegie Hall, the Leventritt jury outdid itself. It ranked the four violin finalists so closely that it took the unprecedented step of asking each to play again. Then, for the first time in the competition's 27-year history, it named two winners: Korea's Kyung-Wha Chung, 19, and Israel's Pinchas Zuckerman, 18, both scholarship students at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music and products of eminent Juilliard Teacher Ivan Galamian.

Kyung (dubbed Cookie by Galamian) is one of seven musical children of an importer who now lives in Seattle. She started on piano at four, but switched to violin two years later because "I kept going to sleep at the keyboard" She left Seoul for Juilliard at twelve, knowing no English. As composed and lovely as a porcelain doll, she "never felt more comfortable" than in the competition, was calm enough to nap during the two-hour wait for the jury's decision.

Zuckerman, a friendly, flop-haired bear of a boy ("Everybody calls me Pinky"), started studying at seven with his violinist father. In 1961, Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals heard him play at the Tel Aviv Conservatory and immediately cleared the way for him to go to New York. In the finals, he says, "I lost my cool. My fingers got all tangled up. It taught me how much I could produce under tension, but I sure hope it never happens again." At a victory celebration, he broke down and cried.

Fire & Flair. Cookie and Pinky have a knack for putting their personalities into their playing--a surprising achievement at an age when most young musicians merely display a coldly glittering technique. Cookie's performance of Bruch and Mozart was sensitive and finely shaded; in passages of Beethoven and Saint-Saens she showed grit and fire as well. Pinky, tapping his feet and swaying into a sort of golfer's follow-through, plunged with intuitive flair and gusto into music by Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, and his broad, compelling tone filled up the hall.

Both performers are clearly ready for the wider exposure the Leventritt award will bring. "Now," says Pinky, "the serious business is starting." Meantime, the other business continues. Three hours after the competition, Pinky was back at Juilliard for the dress rehearsal of a student opera production of The Rape of Lucretia, in which he is just another fiddle player in the pit.

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