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The Editor's blog from the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition: Sunday 7 June – last day of the finals
8 June 2009, Fort Worth, Texas
(From left to right): Second Prize winner Yeol Eum Son, and joint-First Prize winners Nobuyuki Tsujii and Haochen ZhangCredit: Altré Media
Last day of the finals. After hearing his earlier performances of Chopin’s First and Rachmaninoff’s Second concertos, I was looking forward to finding out how Tsujii would fare in recital, where his musicianship would be more transparently on display. He chose for his programme Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’, Chopin’s Berceuse op.57 and the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody no.2, and gave musical and assured readings of each, with some moments of real beauty. The ‘Appassionata’ was technically secure, if rather drilled, although the second movement was sensitively handled; the Chopin Berceuse was nicely shaped and developed; and he got into his stride with the Hungarian Rhapsody, which he played with impressive emotional depth, insight and abandon.
Try as one might, it’s impossible to shake off the sense of astonishment that he has learned to play these scores by ear (including the Hammerclavier in the semifinals); but beyond technique Tsujii also displays a kind of innate, natural and unforced talent for the piano. His renditions may lack a true understanding of the music, and a sense of having something individual to say, but this is possibly due to the way that he learns the music: Tsujii used to study Braille music but found it so time-consuming he started learning pieces by listening to recordings. The problem with this is that he is learning the music through someone else’s interpretation; if he is to develop as a musician he will need to find his own way of understanding the music he plays, independent of the interpretation he has heard in order to learn the notes.
Zhang’s performance of Prokofiev’s Second Concerto was nothing short of brilliant. It’s incredible to think of a 19-year-old playing this piece with such maturity, technical ease and calm confidence. This is widely regarded as the composer’s most taxing piano concerto, and yet by the end of the performance he seemed to have barely broken out into a sweat. Every note was there, every detail of the score scrupulously observed, the whole thing perfectly paced and controlled, with an eye constantly focused on the work’s overriding architecture. This was a nigh-on faultless reading, with strong support from the Forth Worth Symphony Orchestra and James Conlon. Zhang is currently studying at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he has three years to go before he graduates. He gave his debut recital at the Shanghai Music Hall at age five, performing all of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions; made his orchestra debut age six, and five years ago performed the complete Chopin Etudes op.25 at the International Chopin Festival in Poland. With this sort of technical facility, and with age and experience, Zhang might turn a faultless reading into an inspired one.
No piano competition is complete without at least one outing of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, which here received an airing at the hands of Di Wu. In 2005 Wu failed to advance past the preliminaries of the Van Cliburn Competition; having advanced so far this time round, she appeared absolutely determined to go all the way. There was plenty to like about this performance – it had flair, power, beauty and there was plenty of Russianesque struggle and angst in her rendition. She also has a superb technique, but her rendition lacked cohesion and the narrative felt disjointed, with little sense of overall architectural narrative. There were also a couple of occasions when pianist and orchestra were out of sync with one another. The audience didn’t seem to mind any of this, and rewarded Wu with a standing ovation.
ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE WINNERS
From 225 applications, 157 worldwide screenings, 71 performances, there can only be one winner – or rather two. The jury voting procedure dictates that at least one gold medal must be awarded. Thereafter, any combination of gold and silver medals may be awarded up to a total of three medals. A single crystal award will only be awarded if only one gold and one silver are awarded. When the time came for Van Cliburn to announce who had won what, the first big surprise was the Vacatello did not receive a medal: she, Wu and Bozhanov were not placed; although Vacatello did win the audience vote (Tsujii came a close second, Son third). The second big surprise was the announcement that no crystal prize (third place) was to be awarded. This meant one of two things: two golds and a silver, or two silvers and a gold. The announcement that Son had won silver and Tsujii and Zhang tied first-place gold has to be one of the most controversial outcomes of any Cliburn competition, and will no doubt be debated for a long time to come. This is the first year that the medals have all gone to Asians, and the first to award first prize to a blind pianist (although Tsujii is not the first blind pianist to enter the Cliburn). Both top-prize winners are the youngest entrants of the competition.
The three medalists each receive $20,000, a CD recording on the Harmonia Mundi USA label and professional career management for the next three years – including concert tours and recital dates. All finalists receive $10,000 plus US concert tours and career management for three years. Jury Discretionary Awards went to Alessandro Deljavan, Lukas Vondracek and Eduard Kunz; the chamber music award went to Bozhanov and Son; and the best performance of a new work to Tsujii.
For the three winners, and for all the candidates for that matter, taking part in the Cliburn will, if nothing else, have provided a world platform from which they can be heard. Son’s career is already well established – she has performed with most of the leading orchestras in South Korea, as well as with the Israel, Tokyo and Warsaw Philharmonics, and in 2004 she toured with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Lorin Maazel in Asia. Tsujii already has his following in Japan, and has debuted (at age 12) at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. He has also performed with several of Japan’s leading orchestras, and released a CD. Winning the Cliburn will help him get the break into the US he’s been looking for. Zhang has performed with the China National, New Jersey, and Shanghai and Shenzhen Symphony amongst others, and at 17 he became the youngest winner of the China International Piano Competition. It is going to be very interesting to see what happens next for each of them.
Recordings of four of the competitors from this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition can be found on our Downloads page. Simply go click on the Features and Reviews tab, then select the Downloads option.
Chloe Cutts
Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Blog: Day 4 of Finals – Saturday 7 June
7 June 2009, Fort Worth, Texas
Nobuyuki Tsujii performing Rachmaninoff's Second ConcertoCredit: Altré Media
Yeol Eum Son performing the Prokofiev Concerto no.2 in G minor op.16Credit: Altré Media
Mariangela Vacatello performing the Prokofiev Concerto no.3 in C major op.26Credit: Altré Media
The penultimate day of the finals comprised an afternoon and an evening concert, allowing the audience to hear all six finalists perform in one day. The afternoon concert began with this year’s youngest contestant, Zhang, performing Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel op.24 and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, which he dispatched with his customary faultless technical precision and assurance. Zhang has a rather serious and precise artistic temperament, and this translated more successfully to the Brahms, which had moments of real beauty. Gaspard is an altogether different kettle of fish, and while Zhang negotiated the technical demands of the work with consummate ease, it was a rather obedient reading. All the gestures were there, and every marking was impeccably observed, but the work’s characterization and otherworldly subtext eluded him.
Yeol Eum Son here concluded her three-day finals marathon with Prokofiev’s Second Concerto. Of all the finals candidates, Son is the only one to have really put her stamp on a concerto – as she did here with the Prokofiev. The Second is most technically demanding and musically outlandish of Prokofiev’s concertos, and Son demonstrated that she had the energy, tenacity and dynamism to negotiate its colossal four-movement architecture magnificently. This music is not for the faint-hearted – the terrain is extreme, the temperament darkly wild and catastrophic, the atmosphere barbaric and full of menace. Son played dangerously - teetering on the knife-edge between control and wild destruction, yet she never lost the plot. She kept control whilst creating the illusion of being on the brink of losing it, and all the while maintaining constant communicating with conductor and orchestra. She karate chopped her way through the audacious five-minute long first movement cadenza like a thing possessed, yet never was her playing affected or self-indulgent.
Nobuyuki Tsujii, who performed Chopin’s First Concerto on Thursday, here gave a sensitive and thoughtful reading of Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto. He recovered admirably from the temporary loss of cohesion between pianist and orchestra at the beginning of the piece to deliver a performance that was admirable and at times extremely moving. Tsujii’s blindness compels him to play with his hands close to the keys, and this restriction of physical movement unfortunately has an impact on his sound, which is rather small. Often his playing was submerged within the orchestra, and climactic moments never fully bloomed. He was far better suited to the Adagio sostenuto, which was very beautiful and moving, but in the finale his presence receded again. Nevertheless, this was an emotionally charged and engaging performance and deserving of the standing ovation.
The evening concert opened with Di Wu’s recital of Bach’s Toccata in F sharp minor BWV910, Schoenberg’s Klavierstucke op.11 and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. The Bach was beautifully etched; the Klavierstucke – not the easiest piece to understand and communicate to an audience – engrossing. Wu is an intense and intelligent player, and her programme was perhaps designed to demonstrate an ability to get inside the sound worlds of widely varied repertoire. This worked well with the Bach and Schoenberg, but Gaspard is an ambitious piece for such a young pianist to tackle, and as with Zhang I felt that while the notes were all there, it was the characterization and the real understanding of the work that that was lacking.
There can have been few middle of the road responses to Bozhanov’s performance of the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto this evening. His performances in the preliminary and semifinal rounds had been widely praised, and many tipped him as a favourite to win the competition. Watching him perform the Rachmaninoff Second, I found myself wondering whether the pressure of competing in such a high profile competition is starting to take its toll on his playing. If his finals recital rather went off the rails at times, his performance of the Rachmaninoff Second lost the plot entirely. Bozhanov has polarized opinion from the outset of this competition; for some tonight’s performance was flamboyant, dangerous, inspired, energizing, beautiful; for others it was erratic, self-indulgent at the music’s expense, messy, undisciplined and immature. I’m afraid I found myself in the second camp. He may still be the competition’s most compelling personality, but with this performance he took things too close to the edge for my tastes.
Vacatello is a pianist who has gone from strength to strength throughout these finals. Here she launched into a hair-raisingly high-octane performance of Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, negotiating the work’s devilish acrobatics with aplomb, maintaining a relentless forward momentum throughout and all the while maintaining dialogue with the orchestra. The reticence that had marked her recital a few nights back had here completely evaporated. The problem with her performance – and this was also the case with her recital – was that she has a tendency to rush, and occasionally she raced ahead of the orchestra. That aside, she had all the intensity of focus, the magnificent technique and the seriousness of purpose to make this a captivating performance.
For me, then, Vacatello and Son are the most mature and interesting players. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings – the final day of the finals.
Recordings of four of the competitors from this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition can be found on our Downloads page. Simply go click on the Features and Reviews tab, then select the Downloads option.
Chloe Cutts
Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Blog: Day 3 of Finals – Friday 5 June
6 June 2009, Fort Worth, Texas
Evgeni Bozhanov performing his finals recitalCredit: Altré Media
Yeol Eum Son performing Chopin's Second ConcertoCredit: Altré Media
Mariangela Vacatello performing Beethoven's Fourth ConcertoCredit: Altré Media
Day three, and all six finalists have now given one finals performance – either a recital or one of their two concertos. With the second round of finals performances there is a sense of the candidates upping their game. The concertos may be the crowd-pleasers, but the recitals expose the candidates’ skills at imaginative programming and their ability get inside the sound world of different composers. Bozhanov, who had performed Chopin’s Concerto no.1 on the first day of the finals, is probably the competition’s most compelling musical personality, having attracted as much attention for his facial gymnastics as for his playing. This evening’s recital performance should focus attention on his playing, for it is deserved: he chose an imaginative programme of Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch 1, Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze and the Gounod-Liszt Faust Waltz, and demonstrated a clear understanding and sympathy with each piece. His temperament was particularly well suited to the Schumann in particular, with its multiple themes and extremes of dynamics, colour and shade.
Interviewed in the interval preceding Yeol Eum Son’s performance of Chopin’s Second Concerto, conductor James Conlon described the path to understanding the music of Beethoven and Chopin as ‘a lifetime pursuit’. In this respect one has to remember how young these finalists are, particularly when one is confronted with playing of the maturity of Son. She is the only finalist to perform three days in a row (she certainly has the stamina to be the next Cliburn gold medalist), and yet she has approached each of her performances with the laid-back elegance and poise of a seasoned pro. This is the third time I have heard Son play, and I have found myself captivated each time. Last night we heard the second of two Chopin Concertos no.1 performed by Bozhanov and Nobuyuki Tsujii respectively; this evening Son presented Chopin’s Second Concerto. Every line was so clearly and naturally phrased, and she maintained constant interaction with conductor and orchestra. A serious contender for one of the top three prizes.
Mariangela Vacatello’s cut-glass technique was developed at the Accademia Pianistica Incontri col Maestro in Imola, Italy, where she studied for 13 years with Franco Scala. She performed Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with the same fleet-fingered precision that had been the hallmark of her recital, but while her recital performance had been a rather nervous affair, the Beethoven saw a far more confident player emerge. A word here about the pianos: pianists have a choice of three Steinway instruments – two New York Steinways (a very new instrument and a Cliburn-owned older instrument) and a Hamburg Steinway. Son had chosen the new New York Steinway for her recital, and Vacatello the Hamburg Steinway, and the difference in tone was striking – far brighter on the Hamburg. Vacatello is a serious musical personality with a rather intense approach to piano playing, and her playing sometimes lacks warmth and humour as a result of this. Having said that, there was much to admire in her rendition, particularly in the cadenza.
Tomorrow there are two finals concerts, with Tsujii’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second and Son’s Prokofiev Second probably the most eagerly anticipated. At this stage my feeling is that Son is going to be the one to watch.
Recordings of four of the competitors from this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition can be found on our Downloads page. Simply go click on the Features and Reviews tab, then select the Downloads option.
Chloe Cutts
Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Blog: Day 2 of Finals – Thursday 4 June
5 June 2009, Fort Worth, Texas
Yeol Eum Son, performing her finals recitalCredit: Victor Trevino
Nobuyuki Tsujii performing Chopin's Concerto no.1 in E minor op.11Credit: Victor Trevino
Haochen Zhang performing Mozart's Piano Concerto no.20 in D minor K466Credit: Victor Trevino
The major talking point of this year’s Cliburn is without a doubt the appearance of Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, and with his ascent to the finals media attention has approached fever pitch. Tsujii (known as Nobu) was born blind, and learned his repertoire by listening to tapes of works played hands separately by his first teacher, Masahiro Kawakami. His semifinal performance of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ had inevitably been one of the most highly anticipated of the competition thus far. How it is possible for a person born blind to perform his sort of repertoire is a mystery one can only attempt to comprehend. The job of the jury, of course, is to separate the disability from the playing and listen to the performance on its own terms. Tsujii’s performance of Chopin’s Concerto no.1 was clear, elegant and lyrical – particularly in the second movement – but his interpretation tended to remain on the music’s surface rather than excavating the depths below. It will be interesting to hear his finals recital on Sunday to find out how he fares in solo repertoire.
Preceding Nobu’s performance was Yeol Eum Son’s finals recital. Yesterday I heard Son rehearsing Prokofiev’s wildly futuristic Second Concerto with the Fort Worth SO conducted by James Conlon, and was struck by the robust physicality of her playing. Her choice of recital programme – Egon Petri’s transcription of Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze; Schubert’s Impromptus D935 nos. 3 and 5; and Beethoven’s Sonata op.111 – was a wise move for it enabled her to demonstrate her way with more transparent repertoire before tackling the dark opacity of Prokofiev’s score on Saturday. The Bach was wonderfully light and expressive, and very musical; and her Schubert Impromptus, particularly the B flat major, were both beautifully phrased and conceived. According to another journalist at the competition, Son had only started learning Beethoven two years ago, and yet in this short space of time she has constructed a thoughtful and convincing interpretation of the op.111, which concluded her recital. Son is a mature and unfussy player who puts the music first - the silence that greeted the end of her performance suggests that this approach went down well with the audience.
The competition’s youngest competitor, Haochen Zhang, who turned 19 on 2 June, apparently gave his debut recital at age five, playing all of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, and has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Conlon described Mozart’s K466 Concerto as the ‘Don Giovanni’ of his piano concertos, and it was precisely the operatics that were missing from Zhang’s performance, which otherwise was as poised, balanced and refined as one could wish a Classical concerto to sound. Zhang is very young, and it will be interesting to hear how his playing matures over time. Incidentally, it is a welcome treat to hear a Mozart concerto at a competition final otherwise full of Romantic concertos.
Recordings of four of the competitors from this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition can be found on our Downloads page. Simply go click on the Features and Reviews tab, then select the Downloads option.
Chloe Cutts
Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Blog: Day 1 of Finals – Wednesday 3 June
4 June 2009, Fort Worth, Texas
Mariangela Vacatello performing her finals recitalCredit: Victor Trevino
Evgeni Bozhanov performing Chopin's Piano Concerto no.1 in E minor op.11Credit: Victor Trevino
The mission of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition has always been as much about crossing borders as launching careers. It was established shortly after Van Cliburn won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, helping to thaw the Cold War when it was at its most frosty, and the idea that music could help to overcome political and cultural divides has provided the inspiration and the impetus behind the event ever since. This year sees the competition taking one giant leap towards its ultimate goal of transcending all geographical borders with the launch of cliburn.tv – a website offering internet users anywhere in the world live coverage of the entire competition.
I arrived in Fort Worth for the finals (3 to 7 June) having followed parts of the preliminary and semifinal rounds at various hours of the night over the web in London. Controversy and upsets are par for the course at music competitions, particularly when there is so much at stake (media exposure, recordings, concerts, management, cash…) and there are so many competitors (29 in the preliminaries; 12 in the semis). A big surprise was Czech pianist Lukas Vondracek’s failure to make the semis, since his preliminary recital had apparently been so spectacular that even Van Cliburn joined in the standing ovation. Vondracek does already have a successful career as a concert artist, so one can't help wondering at the wisdom of entering such a high-profile competition in the first place...
Two other competitors who failed to make the finals and who have strongly divided press and public opinion are the German Michail Lifits and Russian Eduard Kunz. Lifitz’s performances of the Schumann Fantasie in the prelims was a competition highpoint, but nerves and mistakes crept into his semifinal recital performance of the Liszt Sonata in B minor, which rather clobbered his chances of getting into the finals. The 28 year old Kunz received very strong support on the Cliburn website blog, with the judges’ decision not to put him forward to the finals described by one blogger as ‘probably one of it’s most devastating wrong judgements’.
The Cliburn final round is, compared to other major piano competitions, particularly grueling: each competitor must perform a recital programme plus not one but two concertos over three days. I was very impressed by Mariangela Vacatello and the Takács Quartets’ sensitive and intimate reading of the Schumann Quintet op.44 in the semifinal chamber round. Her finals recital was similarly full of colour and insight. Yes, she was a little nervous, and this might have made her performances seem a touch reserved, but behind all that is a strong interpretative vision. Vactello’s remarkably light touch was entirely suited to Gaspard, which shimmered and dazzled with myriad textures and contours, and yet there is plenty of power and personality in her playing too, as witness her Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue op.87 no.15.
I had watched Evgeni Bohanov rehearsing Chopin’s Concerto no.1 earlier in the day, and found his finals performance of the work rather slick and glossed over by comparison. Bohanov is certainly a confident player and his performance was in many ways very enjoyable, but the tempo was too fast and some of the poetry and musicality was lost along the way. Until the finals he had been hotly tipped for the gold, but this performance proved less than convincing. Having said that, he has two more finals performances to go, so perhaps it’s too early to judge.
Di Wu’s performance of Beethoven’s Second – the final performance this evening – seems to have divided opinion into to those who say she can do no wrong and those who found her performance flat, streamlined and academic. When I asked her why she had chosen the Beethoven Second, she explained that she wanted some light relief from so much heavy-duty Romantic concerto repertoire. Seems reasonable enough, but the Beethoven Second is not the easiest concerto to pull-off. While Wu played with skill, and there were some beautiful moments, like Bohanov, she rushed her performance and this rather steamrollered the musicianship that had been so evident in her previous performances.
Nerves, adrenaline and exhaustion no doubt played their parts, and in this respect it’s a shame that candidates must perform their concertos at the end of the competition, just when they’re ready to drop with exhaustion. Three recitals in one evening are tiring enough for the audience (particularly those who are jet-lagged); for the candidates, who have already spent weeks practising, rehearsing and performing, the finals must feel like doing a triathlon after running a marathon. At this stage in proceedings, then, my money’s on Vacatello.
Recordings of four of the competitors from this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition can be found on our Downloads page. Simply go click on the Features and Reviews tab, then select the Downloads option.
Chloe Cutts
