THE CANON
The classical establishment does not, historically, hurry. In the summer of 2016 it hurried. Seven of its most storied gates, some of which had not been opened for a teenager in forty years, opened, one after another, and closed politely behind the same boy.
To understand what happened this summer, you have to understand what the awards on this list are for. They are not, primarily, prizes. They are induction ceremonies. They are the mechanism by which the classical world, which does not otherwise do publicity, tells its own institutions, conservatories, orchestras, festivals, publishers, luthiers, who is going to be worth playing for the next thirty years. It is a slow, private, absurdly self-serious business. It hurries for nobody. This summer, it hurried for Luca Starr.
GRAMOPHONE, YOUNG ARTIST OF THE YEAR, the oldest classical award still standing, awarded to a thirteen-year-old only twice before in its history and never, in either instance, in the same year the recipient also won Album of the Year at the Grammys. INTERNATIONAL CLASSICAL MUSIC AWARDS, YOUNG ARTIST OF THE YEAR, voted by a jury of forty-two music critics from twenty countries, on a unanimous first ballot for the first time in the award's decade of existence. ECHO KLASSIK, YOUNG ARTIST OF THE YEAR, PIANO, handed to him at the Konzerthaus in Berlin by a jury chair who spoke for nine minutes and then, out of what looked from the balcony like sheer exhaustion, sat down without announcing the winner and had to be reminded to.
ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY, YOUNG ARTISTS, an award whose citation is normally two sentences and which, in Luca's case, ran to four paragraphs and included the word unprecedented three times in different clauses. GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST, the youngest recipient in the award's history by a margin of three years, an interval the Gilmore's own committee described, in the same breath, as "an accident we did not create and cannot be expected to repair." The AVERY FISHER CAREER GRANT, on a unanimous vote of a five-member panel that had not, in the preceding twelve years, been unanimous about anything, including the pronunciation of Luca's surname.
And, in August, at Schleswig-Holstein, the LEONARD BERNSTEIN AWARD, an award that has not, since its founding, gone to a soloist under seventeen, presented to Luca by an eighty-three-year-old former student of Bernstein's who took Luca's face in both hands, on the stage of the Musikfestspielhaus, and did not, for a full forty seconds, say anything. The recording of that silence has, at the time of writing, been played sixty-one million times.
The old world is not, as a rule, sentimental. It has spent three centuries being burned by prodigies who peaked, and by other prodigies who did not peak but whose careers were sold too quickly for anyone in a black tie to catch up. What was different, this summer, was not the trophies. The trophies were a symptom. What was different was that seven of the most conservative institutions in Western music, in seven different countries, spent the same three months quietly preparing the paperwork for a boy they had not, twelve months earlier, agreed existed.
"We are not," the Gramophone jury chair told me, off tape and through a glass of something dry, "in the habit of anointing children. We are in the habit of watching them fail, and being kind about it later. What Luca has done is make it impossible for us to do the second thing, because he has not, yet, done the first." He paused. He looked at his hands. "That will change, presumably. Everyone's does. But this summer, we made a bet. We were on time for once. We may not have been early enough."