Resolving the Catch

"Their parents know they are great. Their teachers know it. But I am the first manager in their lives who thinks so too." So says a pert, raven-haired Vassar graduate named Susan Wadsworth about the 20 young concert musicians currently under her professional care. As founder, director and 50% of the staff of Manhattan's Young Concert Artists Inc., Wadsworth offers her charges a resolution of the music business's own Catch-22. It is fiercely difficult for fledgling artists to establish themselves without the help of big managers like Sol Hurok, Herbert Barrett or Columbia Artists; yet the big managers are rarely interested in fledgling performers.

Young Concert Artists is dedicated to finding gifted musicians between the ages of 18 and 28; and then, after a proper round of concert introductions, losing them to the Huroks. In this way, during its ten years of existence, Y.C.A. has helped to launch the careers of Violinists Pinchas Zukerman and Paul Zukofsky, Pianists Ruth Laredo and Richard Goode, Cellist Ko Iwasaki and Flutist Paula Robison, among others. Its remarkable record has been largely due to two factors: a nonprofit operation subsidized partly by private foundations, and Wadsworth's own energies and discriminating ear for talent.

Make or Break. The Y.C.A. method is best illustrated by a case history. Take Pianist Nerine Barrett, 28. Nerine grew up in the sun and surf of Montego Bay, Jamaica, where her father was headmaster of a boys' school and her mother a cultured amateur pianist. It was an idyllic background, but not a very stimulating one for a teen-ager who wanted to become a concert artist. When she was 17, Nerine won a Jamaican government scholarship to go to London, where she studied with internationally known Ilona Kobos. In 1965, after four years, she landed an engagement with the City of Birmingham Symphony. Then not much else happened. Nerine began to realize what many had learned before her: New York was still the make-or-break city in the music world. How to attract a major American manager without any credentials--without a victory in a big European contest, say, or a New York review?

Nerine turned to Susan Wadsworth, whose fame had spread to London by that time. She got the young artist a Carnegie Recital Hall debut, and indirectly that first New York review (favorable). Then, drawing only a 5% commission (v. the standard 20%), Manager Wadsworth began to cajole bookings--a woman's club here, a Y.M.C.A. there, with an occasional orchestral date in between. Gradually, Nerine, whose powerful pianistic stride belies her petite, endearingly frail look, began to catch on. "You can come back any time," said a concert manager in Dayton in 1969. She has every year since. Last month she played in the relative obscurity of a Philadelphia Quaker school auditorium, but last week she was soloist at regular concerts of the New York Philharmonic, playing Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto. Next season, fulfilling the Y.C.A. program, Nerine will graduate to the professional management of Harold Shaw.

Susan Wadsworth, 35, was herself an aspiring pianist when she got the idea for Y.C.A. She kept being impressed by young fellow performers and asking when she could hear them in public. Their usual reply: never. To rectify that situation, she began arranging a series of Monday night concerts in a Greenwich Village restaurant. She got the use of the place in exchange for 300 second-hand dining chairs she bought for the owner. The first season (1961-62) she picked the artists herself. "It was just by nose," she says. Today, working out of a two-room office provided free by a Manhattan realtor who happens to be her mother, she has the help of an expert jury of pros in screening Y.C.A. hopefuls.

The price of her new career has been the abandonment of her old one. Yet for her, giving up the piano was a painless sacrifice. "Practicing the piano," Susan Wadsworth concedes, "seemed to be the thing that bored me most in life."

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