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Last Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, the lovely, the talented Hertz Hall played host to the First Berkeley Piano Competition. The university recently came into possession of a fabulous 1927 Steinway grand piano, which was “a bequest by Leone Squires McGowan,” and was “to be donated to a ‘worthy student of piano at the University of California, Berkeley.’”
This begged several difficult questions, one being “Where the hell would a Berkeley student keep that shit?” and, more importantly, “How do we decide who gets the Steinway?” The music department had one word: “Battle.” Oh, and in case nobody was up to snuff, they reserved the right not to give it to anybody.
Thus, the tension was palpable in every crevice of the airy cathedral of sound, as each of 25 undergraduate, graduate and recently graduated contestants played Brahms’ Intermezzo in A major and another piece during the first round for a jury that included notoriously bad-ass Brit and Bach uber-expert, Professor Davitt Moroney. After an excruciating hour of deliberation, the judges whittled the competition from 25 of Berkeley’s best to six finalists–Percy Liang, Jared Redmond, Pheaross Graham, Tony Lin, Dinah Lu, and Richard Zhu.
Did we mention there were only supposed to be five finalists? Yeah, this thing had more twists than the last season of “Project Runway,” and probably almost as many people watching. OK, maybe not that last part, but there actually was a considerable audience–as if contestants weren’t under enough pressure from the hawk-like eyes and dog-like ears of the jury.
In the end, only one would walk away with the grand prize (chortle), and that one was Jared Redmond, a 2007 graduate with a major in music. (Well, knock us over with a feather!) Second place–and a positively whopping $500–went to Tony Lin, a graduate student who has a Bachelor of Music in piano performance from Northwestern, among other things–like a BA in psychology and Slavic studies. Goddamn music majors …
Image Source: KarlKunde under GNU Free Documentation
First Berkeley Piano Competition [UC Berkeley Music Department]
Comments:
Apr 11, 2008 at 2:46 am
What is up with all the random italics? I like your writing style, but your sarcasm/whatever else you’re trying to portray is being more than slightly obfuscated by those and the snarky asides.