The top three prizes in the 2023 Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition and Festival were awarded Saturday evening at the Meyerson Symphony Center. Awards were presented following piano concerto performances with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, led by guest conductor Valentina Peleggi.
Seokyoung Hong, a 15-year-old from South Korea, took the $15,000 first prize. The $10,000 second prize went to Yifan Wu, 14, from China, and the winner of the $5,000 third prize was Jan Schulmeister, 16, from Czechia. Each of the three finalists also received a $2,500 scholarship for future study.
Hong also received the $500 audience award, and three semifinalists — Zihan Jin (14, China), Modan Oyama (17, Japan) and Zhonghua Wei (14, China) — were given $2,500 each.
The Saturday afternoon concerto performances and evening awards ceremony followed three earlier rounds of solo piano recitals at Southern Methodist University’s Caruth Auditorium.
In the nine-day process, 23 competitors from countries including Japan and the United States were narrowed to the three finalists. Competitors were chosen via video auditions from 248 applicants from 44 countries. Winners in each round were selected by a nine-person jury of concert pianists and teachers chaired by Janina Fialkowska.
All three finalists commanded utterly sure technique and communicative skills. Listeners could certainly disagree on their merits, though, and I would have rated the three pianists in the opposite order. But I heard only Saturday’s final round, whereas the jury was to base judgements on the finalists’ performances in all four rounds.
In an age of so much aggressive playing, Schulmeister’s unforced touch in the Saint-Saëns Second Concerto could fill the room with sound when needed, but without the metallic edge heard from too many young pianists these days. And he savored nuances of quietness and delicacy, as if drawing sound out of the piano rather than imposing it from outside. The opening ruminations and flourishes were elegantly played, and the middle movement sparkled.
If less distinctive, Wu’s solid, tasteful performance of the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor could stand up against most you’d hear from name-brand concert pianists. He brought poetry to each appearance of the first movement’s lyric theme.
Playing the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Hong supplied the edgiest tone of the afternoon and made the greatest show of virtuosity. But while that virtuosity audibly excited the Meyerson audience, he pushed some faster variations a bit faster than the orchestra could comfortably manage. Slower variations could be prosaic.
Inaugurated in 2015 and open to pianists ages 13 to 17, the Junior Competition is a companion to the better known Cliburn International Piano Competition for pianists 18 to 35. Held every four years in Fort Worth, the latter is one of the world’s best-known piano contests. The Cliburn also sponsors a competition for amateur pianists 35 and older.
The competitions and their sponsoring organization are named for the late Louisiana-born, Texas-raised pianist Van Cliburn. In 1958, at the height of Cold War tensions, he became an overnight sensation by winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, which had been expected to reward a Russian pianist.
Back in New York, he was given the only ticker-tape parade ever given to a classical musician, and a cover story in Time magazine proclaimed him “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.” At the end of the 1970s, he mostly cleared his performance calendar for a decade and a half before returning to selective concertizing. In 1978 he moved to the Fort Worth mansion where he lived until his death in 2013.
