Caption: The Ivory Trade:Music and the Business of Music at the Van Cliburn International Piano CompetitionBy Joseph HorowitzSummit Books, 281 pages, $21.95Review by John Guinn"Competitions are for horses, not artists."So said Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, and many observers of the classical music scene would agree. It has become a truism to claim that all winners of major music competitions play like automatons, their personalities suppressed to preclude any possibility of alienating jury members.Joseph Horowitz, a former New York Times music critic who created something of a stir with "Understanding Toscanini," his 1987 book that set out to debunk the late Italian maestro's reputation, would not necessarily agree with Bartok."Taking stock of the Van Cliburn competition, I find that it holds up a mirror to my own ambivalence," Horowitz writes near the end of "The Ivory Trade," his latest commentary on contemporary culture.Horowitz (no relation to the late pianist Vladimir Horowitz) finds much fault with Cliburn, one of the world's lucrative competitions.But Horowitz who attended the 1989 Cliburn competition that..
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