Young Concert Artists is a New York City-based non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting the careers of talented young classical musicians from all over the world. Founded in 1961 by Susan Wadsworth, the organization holds two competitions annually, one in New York City, United States at the 92nd Street Y and the other in Leipzig, Germany at the Felix Mendelssohn College of Music and Theatre. The competition allows artists from all over the world to compete as individuals or in a chamber group, such as a string quartet. The amount of winners varies from year to year as there is no specified limit to the number of participants who can win.
Winners of the competition receive a cash prize and are provided the opportunity to perform in concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.. Winners are also provided with an artistic manager who tries to promote the artist through booking concert engagements both in the United States and abroad and providing publicity materials, promotion, and career development. Many artists in the program's history have also made their debut recordings through the help of the Young Concert Artists program.
Notable past winners include violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Ani Kavafian, Ida Kavafian, and Chee-Yun; pianists Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax, Richard Goode, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Christopher O'Riley, Ruth Laredo and Olli Mustonen; flutists Paula Robison and Eugenia Zukerman; the Tokyo, St. Lawrence, and Borromeo String Quartets; violist Antoine Tamestit; cellists Ronald Thomas, Fred Sherry and Carter Brey; French hornists Robert Routch and Eric Ruske; trumpeter Stephen Burns; and sopranos Marvis Martin and Dawn Upshaw.
Famous quotes containing the words young, concert and/or artists:
“that Sunday in July
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—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Proportion ... You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist.... It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way.... A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)