Gilmore to Ingrid Fliter

[piazzo23]

Sorry for my ignorance but what are Gilmore Prizes?

[sharon_f]

See https://www.gilmore.org

[piazzo23]

See https://www.gilmore.org

Thanks!

[sharon_f]

Here is an article from this past Monday's NY Times about Ingrid Fliter and the Gilmore.


Stealth Benefactors Find Their Mark

           
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
Published: January 16, 2006
The Gilmore has landed

Every four years, the Gilmore Artist Award, with its cash prize of $300,000, descends on a pianist of unspecified age and origin deemed worthy of career enhancement and broader recognition. The winner this year, to be announced today and featured at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., in May, is Ingrid Fliter, an Argentine pianist who lives in Milan.

Ms. Fliter was among about 450 pianists nominated in a poll of music professionals and was chosen from a final handful by six judges from the music world who stealthily heard her perform in Washington and Tokyo as well as on privately made live recordings.

"She's hardly an unknown," said Daniel R. Gustin, the director of the Gilmore, "but none of us supposedly wise professionals in the performing-arts world had ever heard of her. Her recordings really turned our heads."

Ms. Fliter (pronounced FLEE-ter), 32, has not recorded commercially, although Video Artists International, Mr. Gustin said, plans to release some of those live recordings, from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Ms. Fliter has performed extensively in Europe and Japan, less so in the United States.

She appeared with the Warsaw Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in 2002 and has performed in concert and in recital in Washington. She gave a recital in Atlanta in October, and is to perform Haydn's Concerto in D (Hob. XVIII:11) with Donald Runnicles and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra from Thursday through Saturday, substituting for Piotr Anderszewski, who was named the last Gilmore Artist in 2002.

It was at the Atlanta recital that Mr. Gustin informed Ms. Fliter that she was to receive the award.

"It was unexpected, completely," Ms. Fliter said last week at her hotel on 57th Street. "And this is something that talks so well about this secret organization, because it's amazing that they were listening to my concerts and I couldn't even suspect that. It's a very noble initiative, because there are no losers. The people that are participating don't know. You're playing in your natural habitat, and this is the best way to judge a musician."

Ms. Fliter spoke with a natural exuberance that multiplied when she went next door, to Steinway Hall, to be photographed. Seated before a grand piano in a room full of them, she plunged briefly into snippets of Chopin, perhaps the composer she reveres most at the moment, improvised a phrase or two, then veered off into Beethoven.

She clearly loved the sound and feel of the piano, and you could almost see her wrapping her mind around the notion that a piano like this might be a way to spend some of her windfall. She plays on a rented instrument at home in Milan.

But she is also contemplating other uses for the money: commissioning a work, for example, though she is not a particular specialist in modern music beyond that of her compatriots Alberto Ginastera and Astor Piazzolla. And she has long nourished a desire to record the five Beethoven concertos.

"I haven't decided yet," she said. "It's too soon. It's incredible."

Ms. Fliter - who speaks fluent English with a lilting accent, needing only occasionally to search for a word - was born and reared by music-loving parents in Buenos Aires. She took naturally to the piano, learning to read music only later. She made her debut at the Teatro Colón at 16, playing Beethoven's Third Concerto.

A year or two later she auditioned for her formidable compatriot Martha Argerich, a pianist of astonishing range and depth and the patron saint of Argentine players. Ms. Argerich not only referred her to a teacher in Germany, but also gave Ms. Fliter the use of her home in Geneva.

Ms. Argerich remains an obvious model. "I grew up with her from the very beginning," Ms. Fliter said. "She's a big example of freedom in interpretation, in music, in feeling, so naturally powerful, sincere and honest. She has a big imagination, and this is contagious to the people that meet her and the people that surround her."

After a brief return to Argentina, where Ms. Fliter met an Italian piano teacher who invited her to study with him, she moved to Italy, settling for a time in Imola , a northern Italian town, in 1995. She won a concerto competition, then took fourth prize in the Busoni International Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy, in 1998.

There she met another major influence, the Hungarian pianist and conductor Zoltan Kocsis, who was on the jury. "He always tells me, 'Never play too much, but always play good,' " she said.

In 2000 she won a silver medal in the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, a distinction worth more to a career than a gold medal almost anywhere else. For Ms. Fliter, it led in particular to stepped-up activities in Japan.

Although Ms. Fliter continues to study in Italy (fortepiano as well as piano), the Gilmore judges evidently found her a finished artist. The choice was said to be unanimous.

"She projects an exceptional sense of storytelling and a complete naturalness," said Charles Hamlen, the founding director of Classical Action, an AIDS relief organization, and one of the judges. "Every single time we got to Ingrid's CD's, the music leapt off the discs."

Another judge, Ara Guzelimian, the senior director and artistic adviser of Carnegie Hall, concurred: "We just kept checking ourselves as we listened. We had never heard of her, and we had only sketchy information. Could she possibly be this good? She's such an engaging musical presence, the ear immediately perks up."

Mr. Guzelimian said that Carnegie had extended an invitation for Ms. Fliter to appear in Zankel Hall in a coming season.

The Gilmore Artist Award was established in 1989 as a way to dispense funds from the estate of Irving S. Gilmore, a department-store magnate and amateur pianist, who specified that the money should benefit pianists. Its method of "stalking" performers without their knowledge was conceived as an alternative to the competition model, and although the results have been uneven, the Gilmore prize has come to rival if not surpass the Van Cliburn competition in prestige. The winners before Mr. Anderszewski were David Owen Norris in 1991, Ralf Gothoni in 1994 and Leif Ove Andsnes in 1998

[pianistimo]

you see!  there IS hope for pianists of all ages.  (going to kalamazoo wouldn't be my FIRST choice of place to go).  you just start making up your own fun as you go.

somehow, 'happy gilmore' always comes to mind.  i just see this pianist going out there and playing really well because they have nothing to lose.