EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part I of a retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation. Part I highlights the origins and formative years while Part II (go to this link) summarizes The Bachauer’s multifaceted legacies on and off the concert stage. The Utah Review is grateful for the assistance of Bachauer officials as well as the staff in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, in conducting research and gathering materials for this anniversary retrospective. The Utah Review also acknowledges the invaluable dissertation that Michael Dean completed in 2010 to earn the doctor of musical arts degree at The University of Oklahoma.
There was a great flourishing in the arts scene of Utah during the 1960s and 1970s. In less than two decades, every major performing arts form experienced significant expansion. Ballet West, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Repertory Dance Theatre, Pioneer Theatre Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Utah All-State High School Art Show, NOVA Chamber Music Series, Utah Opera and Utah Arts Festival were founded during the Great Flourishing.
Equally significant in boosting Utah’s well-deserved international reputation which developed as part of that Great Flourishing is the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation, an achievement that has made Salt Lake City one of the world’s most important centers for piano artistry in concerts, education, festivals and, of course, competitions. In 2026, The Bachauer is marking its 50th anniversary this month with two weeks of competitions in two categories featuring pianists from around the world, ranging in age from 11 to 18 (June 14-27).
Many will be surprised to know that The Bachauer, as it is commonly known, started in 1976 as a weeklong summer piano festival at Brigham Young University, with the competition arising almost as an afterthought. Founded by Paul Pollei, a BYU piano professor who had studied exhaustively the mechanics of music festivals and competitions, the event grew so rapidly that before the end of the 1970s, it attracted global attention and pianists, many of whom have become renowned concert artists as well as some of the most sought after piano teachers.
Strengthened over five decades, Its international reputation is indisputable. The Bachauer’s presence in Utah’s music ecosystem is magnified not only by its four-year cycle of competitions, but also by its annual concert season, its extensive involvement in Utah schools and music education, and piano festivals held in years between competitions.
THE SPIRIT OF THE BACHAUER: THE LEGACY OF ITS NAMESAKE
The golden anniversary milestone is also the right moment for Utahns to recognize why the foundation and competition are named in memory of Gina Bachauer, a pianist born in Greece. She studied during her twenties with Sergei Rachmaninoff and later made her first appearance in the U.S. at the age of 37, which set her on a path as a concert pianist in high demand.
In a 1951 article published shortly after Gina Bachauer came to the U.S. to make her American debut, it was chronicled that she already had received impressive reviews from European music critics: “[B]ut in the United States, European reviews are looked at with some skepticism and a handful of friends cannot sell out the hall. Miss Bachauer, for all of her growing reputation overseas and for all that she had been one of the few pupils ever accepted by the great Sergei Rachmaninoff, faced the same debut hurdle.”
The hall’s audience was scanty plus some skeptical critics. The same 1951 article: “However, from the opening chords of the Bach-Busoni Toccata in C, it was clearly apparent to all present that Gina Bachauer was an extraordinary pianist, and the convictions were stronger as she progressed in her program through Haydn, Brahms, Liszt and Ravel, including the the fiendishly difficult Scarbo.” Reviews from the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post proclaimed her the most talked-about pianist of the 1950-51 season. She was so popular that she returned again in 1951 to Town Hall and this time the house was full, the audience, eager and enthusiastic. Here was pianism in the grand manner played by an artist who was mistress of both her music and her keyboard.”
Her first important teacher was Waldomar Freeman, who had been Rachmaninoff’s partner in two-piano recitals and was teaching at the Athens Conservatory in 1929 when she was 16. Freeman sent her to London with a letter to the brooding Russian master. She haunted him for days. Rachmaninoff was annoyed but that soon changed.
About her time studying with Rachmaninoff, she said the following in an article published in the Clavier magazine: “Studying with Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest experiences of my life. One of the biggest experiences was to discuss music to discuss form and interpretation, especially how to produce a beautiful sound.” She recalled how he always emphasized color in tone.
Much of what Bachauer said about her time studying with Rachmaninoff certainly reverberates to this day, especially as competition finalists prepare concertos to play with the Utah Symphony or with any orchestra in the world. She explained that “he wanted the soloist to have a perfect knowledge of the orchestration and of every instrument that would collaborate with it so that in the concert, [everything] would sound perfectly balanced between the soloist and the orchestra.”
From a March 1963 interview with Bachauer, Eugene Lewis of the Dallas Times Herald wrote that whenever Rachmaninoff would accompany her at the second piano, “every once in a while, he would stop and ask her what instrument of the orchestra was taking a particular figure when she could not answer he abruptly stopped.” He was adamant, according to Bachauer, who recalled what Rachmaninoff told her: “You mean, you do not know the orchestra score, he demanded and said, ‘Come back when you know it… I hate pianists who play a concerto as if it were a solo. The piano must be a part of the orchestra.” Although Bachauer said it was “a little shattering to me at the time, but I shall always be grateful that he taught me this lesson ever since I have always practiced with an orchestral score.”
World War II broke out as her career was getting started. She flew to Egypt where she stayed for six years where she found quite a different kind of audience in the Allied troops. She played more than 600 times for the British, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans. She even learned to play boogie-woogie from listening to records on the radio. “I was a first class boogie-woogie player. I was marvelous,” she said proudly in a magazine interview published years later.
In 1966, Alice Hughes, writing for King Features Syndicate, wrote, “In this predominantly male world of musicians there is a credo that no woman, however accomplished the musicologist, can play the piano as well as a male virtuoso. Gina Bachauer disproves this fallacy. Tomorrow’s concert is all sold out as every concert she plays. Sol Hurok is her impresario and she is one of his most prized performers. She tours the world from London to Cape Town from Athens to San Francisco. It is never an empty seat in any concert hall when she is at the piano.”
When Gina Bachauer died in 1976, New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, “In many respects, Gina Bachauer was a female Arthur Rubinstein. Her playing had much the same kind of a joie de vivre, sweet and controlled romanticism. Bachauer was an unknown when she made her first trip to the United States in 1950. She made her debut in Town Hall and it took just about five minutes for her to electrify the audience and a few music critics.” She became extremely popular on the concert circuit. “She liked people and was considered a famous raconteur. Her managers reported that she made as big an impression off stage as on. Gina Bachauer loved life, and that quality was always communicated in her playing.”
GINA BACHAUER IN UTAH
In Utah, Bachauer had more than a bit part in the Great Flourishing during the 1960s and 1970s. Named an honorary citizen of Utah who also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Utah, she was called Saint Gina by Maurice Abravanel, the legendary music director of the Utah Symphony from 1947 to 1979, who was a beloved friend and fellow Greek. She was more than a periodically appearing soloist with the Symphony. Making contacts with the Greek government, Bachauer assisted in arranging the Utah Symphony’s first European tour which included performances at the prestigious Athens Festival in her homeland. In a letter to Bachauer, Abravanel wrote,”I can promise you that as long as I live, I will want to conduct for you, Saint Gina.”
Harold Lundstrom, former Deseret News music editor, had highlighted four ways in which her presence had a profound impact on the region’s arts scene: “first, she has been one of the symphony’s most popular guest artists, both as soloist and in company with her royal pupil, Princess Irene. He continued, “Second, Alec Sherman, her husband, conducted the world premiere of Dr. Leroy J. Robertson‘s Passacaglia at the Athens Festival at the time Robertson was chair of The University of Utah’s music department. Third, the Utah Symphony’s 1966 European tour commenced at the Athens Festival largely through Bachauer’s good offices. She appeared as a soloist with Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony whose home was on the campus. Fourth, Ballet West, another university-related group is now [late 1960s] concluding a European tour, which also commenced in Athens through the now familiar route.”
Lundstrom’s characterization of Saint Gina is unforgettable: “She is more than a performing artist of the highest grade. She is a devoted and unselfish teacher. She appears frequently for charitable causes. She is a gourmet cook and she enjoys a reputation as a raconteur second only to that of an artist and she is a developed patriot. A truly liberated woman she has won her freedom through discipline and self mastery of admittedly enviable talents.”
THE BACHAUER: THE FIRST YEARS AT BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
As Pollei recalled many years later when Michael Dean interviewed him for his dissertation at The University of Oklahoma, “I had just returned from doing my doctorate, and I was all free from everything … and I was very anxious to jump in and help my students. I said, ‘We live in Salt Lake City, Utah or Provo, Utah. It’s not exactly the center of the universe, but we do have good music coming to us all the time, both at the university and in Salt Lake City. But we don’t have all world-class artists…. Here’s a chance for just piano, nothing else, … to help the piano students at Brigham Young University be surrounded intensely and during a week period … to just have an inundation of great artists teaching them both in master classes and lectures, in recitals, [and] every kind of demonstration possible.’”
Pollei’s vision for the Bachauer festival and competition was inspired by the observations he made at the University of Maryland’s International Piano Festival and Competition. He explained, “They had daytime master classes, and sometimes lectures … with members of the jury, and evening concerts by major artists. Really major artists, you know, from all over the world. … I thought, ‘My gosh, this is wonderful!’ … It was very enjoyable and very stimulating, and so I thought, ‘I could do this!’
Few people might be aware that in 1976 when the event started that actually the competition was almost an afterthought. For example, the Deseret News highlighted that BYU had scheduled a piano festival. In addition to mentioning the concerts, the article cited the weeklong festival would have master classes in accompaniment, pedagogy, and music literature. Only in the fourth paragraph did the first mention of the competition occur and in the fifth paragraph did it actually mention that the competition would take place on the fourth day of the event. As Pollei told Dean in 2009, “I mapped [the schedule] out and decided we [could] invite … those artists and I said, ‘We have one day extra.’”
The competition only comprised seven hours of the five-day event, held June 28–July 2. Eighteen pianists from ten states, ages 16-30, competed for the first time, contending for a $500 prize and the opportunity to perform an afternoon recital as part of the BYU Summer Piano Festival. The inaugural winner was Douglas Humpherys, a BYU senior who studied with Professor Robert Smith. He is the foundation’s current artistic director who is professor of piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.
Guest recitals included performances by Tom Brown, winner of the 1975 Bloch Young Artists Competition and Malcolm Frager, winner of the 1959 Leventritt Competition and 1960 Queen Elisabeth Competition, along with some of the most prominent concert pianists and teachers of the day, including Donna Turner Smith, Reid Nibley and Yoshie Akimoto. KBYU-FM broadcasted each competition round and the winner’s recital for use by National Public Radio. Writing to Dr. Pollei after the conclusion of the inaugural festival and competition, Marguerite Miller, nationally recognized piano pedagogue and professor at Wichita State University: You said you were going to plan a special event, but I had no idea that it would be so spectacular.
About six weeks after the festival, Bachauer suddenly died. While plans were already in motion to plan the 1977 festival, Pollei and others including Alec Sherman, an internationally renowned conductor who was Bachauer’s husband, approved naming the competition in her honor, beginning in 1978.
In a 1988 interview, Humpherys said, “It grew by leaps and bounds every year. If there is anything that is remarkable about this competition, it is that it has never stayed the same. There hasn’t been one year that something hasn’t grown about the competition. The year between 1977 and 1978 was big because it was the first year it was called Gina Bachauer, they gave the piano away and they had the orchestra. All of that happened in one year.”
When asked in that same interview about how winning the Bachauer influenced his career, he said,
That is a very interesting question for me because under the surface just when you see the facts of how much money and how much smaller it was! you would think, ‘well probably not very much,’ but it has influenced it a lot for several reasons. The first one is just that every time the Bachauer rolls around again… it has been helpful in getting a reputation established outside of Utah from the standpoint that it is big enough now that people recognize the name of the competition as a former winner. The publicity is very helpful in creating opportunities.
The biggest help for me personally was that it was such a tremendous confidence boost, because even though the prizes were small, they were very good pianists in the competition. In fact, one of my former teachers was in the competition in the year I won. There were several people who had graduated from BYU and had gone on to Peabody and for me personally to know I could win something that had Leon Fleisher students [whom one critic called “one of the most refined and transcendent musicians the United States has ever produced”] and Adele Marcus students [the renowned teacher at Juilliard] there.
As the Bachauer grew bigger, it became more and more helpful.
Those words hold up convincingly to this day.
Recalling the 1977 competition, one year later, Humpherys said, “The very comical aspect of that second year competition was that I was still here [at Brigham Young University] as a student and over the summer I was working in the ticket office as a part-time student job. I remember Hal Goodman [then the music department chair at BYU] coming down one day and saying that he thought that it showed great humbleness to win a competition one year and sell tickets to it the next year.”
By 1980, when the Deseret News published a preview about the competition and the piano festival, it was evident right from the lead that the focus was the “48 young hopefuls who were coming to BYU to compete that year representing 18 states and almost that many foreign countries. They carry with them credentials from some of the most prestigious, music academies in the world Julia Curtis, Eastman, Peabody, and they were competitors from the Royal College of Music in London, the Vienna, Academy, Rome’s Saint Cecilia Academy and the conservatories of Paris, Brussels Moscow and Leningrad.”
For example, the 1979 winner, the Greek-born Panayis Lyras, in 1980. took fourth in the Rubenstein Competition in Tel Aviv, where he was beaten ironically by last year‘s third place winner at BYU, Gregory Allen of the University of Texas, who that time came in first.
Many might not remember how difficult those early years were, especially to make sure that the event could be held every single year. Goodfellow wrote, “but considering that the project, as a whole, almost went under earlier, disrupted for lack of funds. In many ways the most impressive thing about the BYU festival this year is that it is happening at all.”
Also, in 1980 at the Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Wetzel started off by writing about the debate about whether piano competitions were actually good for the artist. Pollei disagreed, “though he conceded that the pressure of competition can sometimes rob a pianist’s performance of spontaneity in the sense of joy. He believes that more often than that the music created in contests is of the highest quality. Pollei said, When people play in international competitions, they are like Olympic runners. They are scaled up to a level that is unsurpassable.”
Though he had admitted that competitions do have drawbacks, Pollei was quick to add that the Bachauer has been designed to modify some of them. In fact, he says the BYU contest’s unusual format is one of the reasons it has grown and only five years from a local contest into one which will draw 49 quarterfinalists from the United States and 11 other countries to Provo.
When Pollei designed the competition, he said, “We chose to do things quite differently. First of all, the judges never say a word. The competitors never hear the judge say, ‘please stop, please skip. Please play this piece. All they do is evaluate and write down their ratings. The other thing is that there is no repertory requirement. This is the most unusual feature of our competition and that’s why so many people who have entered it have spread the word about the Bachauer… They say that the Bachauer competition in Utah is the most famous competition in New York. In 1980, there were more entrants from the Big Apple and the Juilliard, in particular, than from any other locale.
Pollei said the competitors call it “an easy competition, not easy to win but easy to enter because you don’t have to learn 14 études and three sonatas and five concerti. You play what you want and you build your own program the way you want…In fact, I’m sticking my neck out by saying this: I can almost pick the winners by what they’re going to play. A person can almost make or break himself by his choice of repertory.”
In 1980 there were a couple of new wrinkles. The first allowed pianists who have won or placed high in another major competition to enter without submitting an audition tape. These pianists were admitted automatically to the quarterfinal round. Pollei said it really brought out “the Who’s Who of past competitions. It’s like an Olympics of the piano.
A second rule enhanced the competition’s claim to internationalism. That year, eight of the contest’s 13 judges came from countries other than the U.S., including Holland, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Britain, Israel, and Poland. One juror was the director of the Chopin international piano competition, held in Warsaw. was president of the Federation of international music competitions, which is headquartered in Geneva. Also that year Andrey François Marescotti was president of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, the same body that eventually certified the international credentials of the Bachauer. The Bachauer competitions, have consistently received the highest rating in The Alink-Argerich Foundation compendium review of more than 600 piano competitions worldwide.
By 1980, the prizes for the Bachauer were among the richest of any piano competition. The first prize included a Steinway grand piano and solo performances in Utah, California, Idaho and Washington, D.C. The second prize included solo engagements and $2,500 in cash and the third prize also offered concert opportunities and $1,500 in cash. This was significant, considering that the first prize in 1976 was just $500.
BACHAUER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UTAH SYMPHONY
Reflecting on the first competition in 1976, Pollei said, “I had the audacity to think of the BYU international piano competition with the prize of $500. It was so presumptuous but I caught on that first year.” Regarding BYU’s decision to cancel the competition in 1981, because of excessive budgetary pressures, Pollei said events eventually worked out for the best.
He had approached the Utah Symphony board about hosting the competition, but the idea was rejected. “I didn’t give up because the Steinway had been promised for the next competition and I wasn’t going to give it back. The board changed its collective mind at a meeting a month later and the Bachauer, under the auspices of the Utah Symphony, was now being held every two years?
No doubt, the Utah Symphony’s sponsorship of The Bachauer facilitated the growth of a young performing arts institution looking for stability. In 1982, the first competition held in conjunction with the Utah Symphony, William Goodfellow at the Deseret News wrote, “In short, this is without question the most prestigious year the Bachauer has enjoyed to date.” He continued, “It might be well to remember that this is the competition virtually given up for dead a year ago after it was abandoned, following five years of sponsorship by Brigham Young University. To its credit, that institution had done a remarkable job of developing what began mostly as a local piano festival with a contest appended to it into the event of increasing worldwide impact. The winners the first two years were not too surprisingly both BYU students, but in 1978 contestants began to pour in from all over, especially in New York.” To wit: The Juilliard School had produced the last three winners (1978, 1979, 1980).
Pollei told Goodfellow that “it had grown to such proportions that we simply couldn’t let it die because somebody had said there wasn’t enough money. So we took a chance and approached the Utah Symphony, which itself had participated in the competition in 1978 and 1979.”
Dean Elder, music critic and consulting editor for Clavier summed up the 1982 events perfectly: “After almost giving up the ghost, the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition came of age in June… [and] the Utah Symphony came to its rescue… The Utah Symphony, under Maestro Varujan Kojian, accompanied the six finalists’ closing concertos in the gilded Symphony Hall, whose beauty parallels that of its mountainous surroundings.”
Noting that the “gamble had paid off,” Pollei continued, “Without question, Utah itself is now more aware of it. When the Symphony sponsors anything, there’s almost an automatic audience and not just the buying public but the supporting public as well.”
In 1982, the semifinalists performed an eight-minute commissioned work, Cherea, by Swiss composer Andrey François Marescotti. Bachauer’s first commission for the competition came in 1980 with Masks, by Robert Muczynski. Incidentally, it would be 2024, for only the third time in the history of the International Artists competition where the semifinalists played a new commissioned solo work—Two Andean Portraits by Gabriela Lena Frank, one of America’s foremost composers who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for her orchestral work Picaflor: A Future Myth. In an interview with The Utah Review in 2024, Frank said that the commission was a significant development, with Bachauer demonstrating a strong commitment to building a vibrant repertoire for future pianists while sustaining the reverence for great piano masterpieces in competitions and highlighting emerging creative voices.
The Bachauer’s presence thrived during the 1980s. In 1982, an hourlong program of highlights from the competition was broadcast on WNET-TV, the New York City public television affiliate, with Marvin Hamlisch as the host. The same thing happened after the 1984 competition, hosted by Martin Bookspan, which was broadcast a year later, originally on KUED in Utah and then was distributed nationally by the Pacific Mountain Network. In 1983 the competition was accepted as an official member of the International Federation of Music Competitions with its headquarters in Geneva.
In 1987 in a Kansas City Star newspaper feature, David Buechner, the 1984 gold medalist, was interviewed before he was scheduled to perform a recital. He said the Bachauer helped to solidify his reputation in the United States. “That’s an intangible kind of reward, but when I entered the Bachauer, I had been playing with a lot of orchestras. I already had management. It was sort of a step of approval in my life. Engagements were that much easier to secure. I entered the Bachauer at a propitious time. It was expanding into a much larger competition than it had. Maybe the Bachauer was very good for me, but I think it’s also fair to say that was good for the Bachauer too, going to Moscow … and being featured on the television broadcast. That did a lot for me.”
In 1986, for instance, more than 150 applicants inquired about the Bachauer competition. Competitors came from Brazil, France, West Germany, Korea, the Soviet Union, Canada, Great Britain, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Zambia, South Africa, Africa, Belgium, Romania, Venezuela, and the United States. A jury member in the 1978 Bachauer competition, Glacy Antunes de Oliveira, director of the school of music and arts in Goianas, Brazil, organized an audition contest in Rio de Janeiro to aid potential competitors from South America to participate in the 1986 competition. Similar events were held in Shanghai and Beijing. There was only one competitor that year from Utah.
In 1986, Gina Bachauer’s student and friend, Princess Irene of Greece, who performed with her in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in 1969, was the competition’s royal patron. Among the many other international visitors that year were numerous piano teachers from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
Some 58 homes with grand pianos also were located to host competitors. One indispensable feature has always been the role of host families in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area who open their homes to a Bachauer competition quarterfinalist. For ardent fans of classical music who have a spare room and a grand piano available, the opportunity to host a young musician during the competition has led not only to a fascinating cultural exchange but also long-lasting friendships with the pianists.
Some are veterans when it comes to hosting a pianist for the competition. They include families who have hosted a Bachauer competitor every time since 2002, as well as those who have hosted even four or five times. Many families who host a Bachauer medalist or laureate during a competition are happy to have them return as a guest when they return to Utah for a concert engagement. “One of the reasons we got involved with hosting for Bachauer was for our daughter and two grandkids, so that they would be exposed to role models who are very talented, very committed people making beautiful music. In some cases, our grandkids were close in age to some of the competitors,” Betty Yanowitz told The Utah Review in a 2024 interview.
There were 16 judges in 1986. The judges received no fees, but their airfares were paid and the rooms were donated by the Westin Hotel Utah. As the Tribune reported, Pollei had approached the hotel manager in the early days of the competition and suggested he donate the lodging expenses. The man looked shocked, but tahlater agreed. Many downtown restaurants also succumbed to Pollei and all of the judges’ meals were complementary.
Pollei established rules that have always been regarded as unusually fair and simple. All judging is by secret ballot as yes, no,or maybe which can be used in the event of a tie. Unlike other competitions, particularly during those first couple of decades, there was no discussion and no grading or points after judging. After experiencing competitions where some judges became vocal in trying to influence the decisions of their fellow jurists, Pollei said that “secret ballots work best. We found out by trial and error that discussion ruins everything.”
Pollei’s format became the model for subsequent competitions. Fanny Waterman, founder of the Leeds Competition, said, “I prefer the yes or no system that is used at Leeds, Salt Lake City, Tel Aviv, and several other competitions.” Pollei recalled Nelita True’s response to the voting system as chair of the Bachauer juries: “She always says, ‘Paul, I hope you’ll never change this jury voting system because it works.’”
In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Pollei said, “I selected by reputation and oftentimes by meeting them.” Many of the judges have always been performers or teachers of some reputation. For instance, in 1988, Nelita True was chairman of the keyboard division at the Eastman School of Music; Karl-Keinz Kammerling, a professor of music in Hanover, Germany, who served on juries for the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the Leeds Competition in England and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium. Joaquin Achucarro, a Spanish pianist, was a noted European soloist, who also performed with the New York Philharmonic in 1988.
Pollei was indefatigable and supporters were willing to ensure The Bachauer’s visibility would never wilt. Iain B. McKay, representing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and responsible for the Temple Square Concert Series, called Pollei to suggest that some concerts in June, when the festival and completion were scheduled, be devoted to The Bachauer.
For Pollei, the biggest obstacle in organizing The Bachauer was lack of time. A full professor at Brigham Young University’s department of music, he taught three days a week as well as practiced for recitals. In 1986, he had already been at BYU for 20 years. He told the Salt Lake Tribune, “I spent most of my time at the typewriter and on the telephone. We stuff all our own envelopes, lick every stamp and write every letter. I’ve never had a secretary. I’ve learned by practicing the piano that I could type 150 words per minute.”
One of the 1986 jurors, Seymour Bernstein, wrote a post-mortem about the competition for The Golden Trumpet. First, he heaped praise upon The Bachauer’s founder: “One might say that Pollei is himself a person of pure gold, the great-great grandson of Brigham Young. He and his staff created a super structure of efficiency, born of their own selfless spirits, the result of seemingly flawless operation that must surely be a model for all other competitions.” Bernstein, who also was juror in 2004, also quoted a pianist who competed in 1986: “I have never heard of a competition that makes a competitor feel more encouraged and welcome after he is eliminated than before.”
BACHAUER’S INDEPENDENCE: LEAVING THE BIRD’S NEST
In 1987 after the Bachauer separated from the Utah Symphony, it announced its new plans for 1988 which included Bachauer Piano Month in June for the Temple Square Recital Series, and at Promised Valley Playhouse. The split with the symphony was friendly and made with agreement that the competition could only continue to grow as a separate organization. Pollei continued as founder and director with Jay Beck as associate director, Barbara L Tanner as board chairman and Rebecca Felton as associate chairman.
In 1987, Deseret News music critic William S. Goodfellow, recounting the separation of the Bachauer from the Utah Symphony, wrote, “No one seemed anxious to draw the parallel of a bird being pushed from its nest. Just the same, that’s the image that emerged at the news conference last week that outlined the contest, revamped the administrative structure, and targeted new goals for the future. One of the members of the board said if the years of BYU were the competition infancy, I suppose this is akin to puberty. At last we’re moving out on our own.”
It was definitely an amicable agreement about the separation. The Symphony’s executive director at the time, Paul Chummers, said, “We didn’t really have adequate space here for them, but budgeting was a problem. In terms of anticipating what their need would be and in addition to our own plus which my own feeling was for all the expertise we possess we could not do a very good job of running an international piano festival. That’s a very specialized subsection of art management.”
Preliminary competitions took place in 17 cities around the world, and it provided an opportunity for foreign pianists, who otherwise might not be able to afford the trip, to win transportation cost to Salt Lake City. One winner was chosen from each location, and even those musicians who did not win, could still apply for the competition, but had to pay their own way. While juries varied in each location, Paul Pollei served as a jury member at each site. Later, noting that live auditions for the competition raised the bar of performance among the pianists, Pollei standardized the practice which has become integral to all categories of the Bachauer competitions.
In 1988, a Deseret News editorial, noting that there were 58 competitors from 16 nations, concluded, “The Gina Bachauer competition is growing into something that is surprising even its early sponsors and a city is reaping a classical music reputation that has solidified all over the globe.” In an interview with the Deseret News, Pollei said, “I think we’re going to see an artistic level we’ve never been exposed to before a new kind of plane. On the other hand, although there will be fewer American competitors than ever before, there was actually a higher proportion of Utah trained artists, at any time since the competition moved to Symphony Hall.”
Happily, the 1988 competition took place at Symphony Hall and Utah Symphony again took part in the final concerto round and the winner continued to appear on the orchestra regular subscription series, which has continued to this day.
In 1988, when Barbara Tanner stepped down as board chair of the Bachauer, she wrote it was a decision of mixed emotions, but she also highlighted what she was most proud of during her time. She wrote, “The Utah Symphony-Bachauer prospered, and grew in reputation and prestige. The public support grew too in every area: attendance at the programs, public awareness, acceptance, and finally a recognition of the Bachauer as an integral part of our state’s arts program.”
About the first competition after the separation, Tanner explained, “This year [1988] has been a test of our maturity. We had a most successful competition as well as a music festival and June Bachauer month with the Temple Square Series. We grew spectacularly in prestige, both locally and nationally, and our international reputation has put us with the very finest.”
She also mentioned the very positive spirit of The Bachauer. “With his enthusiasm and joy as one of our greatest assets, Paul [Pollei] radiates goodwill and optimism, and so do all on the board when we are together. This wonderful upbeat spirit enriches our competition and helps create the warm and generous hospitality for which we are deservedly famous. Don’t lose this wonderful spirit.” Tanner’s words resonate just as prominently as The Bachauer celebrates its 50th anniversary and prepares to welcome the pianists for the junior and young artists competitions.