August 2024
A lot of people think getting into Juilliard or Curtis makes you an artist.
nononono.
Artists fall along a normal curve. On the right tail, take the finest knife in the world and make one cut. What remains: Mozart, Argerich, Furtwängler. The other 99.999% are mediocres — including the ones with the pedigree, the prizes, the solo recitals, the agent, the reviews, the program notes. They're still left of the cut.
The 1st percentile and the 98th: no difference.
We only have two hours a night.
At the Tchaikovsky Competition, Richter gave Cliburn a perfect score and everyone else the minimum. He wasn't scoring. He was drawing the line.
A real artist isn't the one who delivers reliably — it's the one who might pull off a miracle.