The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was first held in 1962 in Fort Worth, Texas and is hosted by Van Cliburn Foundation. It was created by Fort Worth area teachers in honor of Van Cliburn, who had won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition four years prior with Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3.
The Van Cliburn Competition is held every four years (the year after the United States Presidential elections; thus, the next competitions will be held in 2013, 2017 and so forth). The winners and runners-up receive substantial cash prizes, plus concert tours at world-famous venues where they perform pieces of their choice. Previously held at Texas Christian University, the competition has been held at the Bass Performance Hall since 2001.
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The competition consists up to three full recital programs, new work performance, chamber music, and two concertos for each competitor.
Winners of the top prize awarded in the given year.
One newspaper columnist, Benjamin Irvy, has written in the Wall Street Journal that the Van Cliburn competition was a well run piano competition when it started in 1962. In 1966 it selected the talented Radu Lupu as gold medal winner. Since then, however, the jury in the competition "has more often resulted in odd picks", including Olga Kern and Alexander Kobrin, who respectively won in 2001 and 2005. Irvy contends that the recent picks chosen in 2009, gold medalists Haochen Zhang and Nobuyuki Tsujii, ignored Di Wu, "the most musically mature and sensitive pianist competing in the finals". Yeol Eum Son took second prize and the jury did not award a third place contestant. Irvy criticized that requiring every competitor in the 2009 competition to play chamber music with the "brash" and "imprecise" Takács Quartet from Hungary did "precious few favors" for quintet listeners. Since no third prize was awarded in the 2009 competition, an additional contestant was not given opportunity to make a CD recording sponsored by the competition. Finally, Irvy questions whether Van Cliburn himself, now 74, would have been able to win under the current rules and standards for selecting a winner. The Van Cliburn competition, according to Irvy, has turned into an opportunity for career-advancement.[1]
Horowitz, Joseph (September 1990). The Ivory Trade: Music and the Business of Music at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1 ed.). Summit Books.