DER JUNGE, DER LEISE GEWANN

Der ECHO Klassik ist, in the ordinary year, ein deutscher Preis, whose winners are, in most cases, artists formed in the German musical tradition, on German labels, in German halls. This year the Preis for Young Artist of the Year, Piano, has been awarded to a thirteen-year-old American, whose first appearance in a German concert hall was, per his own account, in October, on the second leg of a European recital tour, at the Konzerthaus Berlin, in front of an audience that did not, at the start of the recital, know what to expect, and that did not, at the end of it, stop applauding for four full minutes.

“Der Junge spielte, und wir hörten auf zu atmen. Es war nicht Konzentration. Es war Respekt.”

What the ECHO Klassik has done this year, in short, is agree with a Berlin audience. The Konzerthaus, in October, was full to the last row. The recital was, per the printed program, half an hour of Bach and Debussy, and half an hour of STARR's own work. It ran, in the end, ninety minutes. He played three encores. He played, per the hall's own recording, none of them faster than he had played the printed program. The last encore was “La Dernière,” which he did not announce, and which, in a hall of eighteen hundred and fifty, was met, on the last chord, by a silence that lasted, per the recording, seven full seconds before the first person clapped.

That silence, per two members of the ECHO jury we spoke to, decided the vote. The German classical establishment is, culturally, not moved by American career trajectories. It is moved by rooms, and by silences. STARR, per the jury's own citation, “spielt für den Raum, und der Raum antwortet.” He plays for the room, and the room answers.

He will be presented with the ECHO in October, at the Konzerthaus. He will, per his tour schedule, be in the building anyway, on the third leg of PIANISSIMO. He has agreed, per his sister, to play one short piece at the ceremony. He has, per the ceremony's producers, asked for the Konzerthaus's own concert Steinway, and not, as is customary, a specially tuned instrument brought in for the occasion. That request has been granted.

The Süddeutsche has, in the last year, been careful, in our own reviews, not to attach adjectives to STARR that he has not earned. He is thirteen. He has, at that age, not yet earned the adjectives that we use for artists in their forties. What he has earned, and what the ECHO has now formally recognized, is the adjective that we most rarely give: er ist ernsthaft. He is serious. He is, at thirteen, more serious about the piano than most artists, in any hall in this country, will ever be about anything.

Amara Starr, his sister and manager, said the family had, of all the awards this year, most wanted the ECHO. “My father,” she said, in a phone call from Virginia, “is German. He would have been unbearable about this one. I would have loved to see him be unbearable.”