Charlie Won HM at Connecticut International Young Artists Competition.
Jun 12th, 2007 by mingyi
On Saturday June 9th, we got up at 4 am to go to the 2nd Connecticut International Young Artists Competition - Unfortunately, Charlie’s group (age 5-8) was scheduled to play at 9 am, and we need to allow 4 hours to get there. It is not easy on a young child.
Charlie did not practice regularly ever since his MMTA 1st place win, with much-deserved time off, Ellen show appearance, and vacation. But he managed to get the Solfeggietto back into decent shape. Before the competition, he was playing his three pieces quite well.
Once we were at the competition, we realized that we were at a huge disadvantage: Charlie’s program was specifically designed for MMTA, which has a 4 mins, 2 piece limit. To make up the difficulty, we added Solfeggietto in our CIYA competition application, which was accepted. But when we looked at the program, Charlie was allowed to only play two pieces - the potentially most impressive piece, Solfeggietto, was cut off his program. The other 7 and 8 year olds this year had huge programs, much more substantial than last year’s competition. Charlie in fact performed quite well, playing his pieces very nicely and musically with no mistake and very few imperfect sounds, but the 7 and 8 years olds played also brilliantly on much longer and impressive programs. Not surprisingly, three 7- and 8-year olds took the top three prizes. Charlie came in behind them and only won Honorable Mention this time.
Naturally we were disappointed, since last year he was tied for 3rd prize. However, Charlie played very well and still came out a winner despite various factors and competing against a much tougher competition field. It also made us realize that Charlie still needs to work hard to be able to compete against the best older kids in multi-state or higher competitions.