Jun 9th 2019

Junior Cliburn winners take a bow in Texas

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

F&A 9 June 2019

 

Australian pianist Shaun Hern Lee, 16, took first prize on Saturday in the final round of the Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition following 12 days of eliminations and associated activities in Dallas, Texas. His winnings totaled $15,000 plus $2,000 for financing his studies in music. Second prize, worth $10,000, went to Eva Gevorgyan, 15, of Russia and Armenia. Third place was taken by JiWon Yang , 17, of South Korea with a purse of $5,000. 

This was the second edition of the junior competition, known popularly as the Cliburn for kids. Youngsters 13-17 years of age were eligible and 229 applicants came forward, of whom 24 were selected. Twenty of the participants were of Asian ancestry. 

Jury members include established professionals such as Alessio Bax (chairman), Philippe Bianconi and Valery Kuleshov. 

Jacques Marquis, president and CEO of the Cliburn Foundation, spoke to me prior to the competition and made it clear what the Junior Competition is not. “The mandate is not about launching careers. It’s about life,” he said.  “We have very different objectives for these young players. We are offering a festival atmosphere and we want to give them an entrance to the next step of their journey.” 

Marquis sees an upsurge of talent from early stages of development. “I think players are getting really good younger and younger.” 

Participants were brought to Dallas, often chaperoned and coached by parents or teachers, to work their way through the preliminary, quarterfinal and semifinal eliminations, culminating in the selection of the three finalists to perform full concertos with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on June 8 under conductor Ruth Reinhardt. 

Artistic workshops filled the day. In sync with teens’ lifestyle, the optional workshops covered a wide spectrum of issues for students facing today’s piano career choices including the use of social media. Participants were offered  master classes, private lessons, seminars on conducting, advice on how to practice, basic stagecraft, how to handle question-and-answer sessions, analysis of what a piano career truly involves, personal branding and how to make positive use of social media. “We will open a lot of windows,” said Marquis. “It will be useful for students with aspirations to become professional musicians.”

 

The lineup of participants this year reflects the growing presence of Asian talent, perhaps providing a preview of where professional piano activity will be coming from in the near future. “We have been seeing this trend for some time,” says Marquis. China is driving its own piano craze, with estimates of serious students ranging from 20 million to 60 million.  Marquis settles for 40 million and attributes the emergence of Asian talent to strict discipline in Asian families compared to lesser ambitions in Western cultures. 

Do they all want to become Lang Langs or Yuja Wangs? Marquis thinks not. “They want to share their music with larger audiences,” he says. “I am really impressed.” 

The underlying objective of the Junior edition is to be viewed as the “champion of classical music worldwide” and to keep the Cliburn profile active internationally during the four-year hiatus between the primary competitions. “Four years is a long time today,” he says. 

The Cliburn world has taken on a strategic business flavor reflecting Marquis’ training and experience. Besides being a pianist, he is a graduate in business administration and brings financial and fund-raising expertise to bear at the Foundation level. His rhetoric is laced with such terms as “personal branding” for the youngsters and “strategic advancement” for the Cliburn organisation. The businesslike structure seems well-suited to this very artistic enterprise.

 

Another version of this article appears in the current International Piano magazine.

 

 

 

 

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Sep 25th 2014

Think of your favourite piece of music. Do you get shivers when the music swells or the chorus kicks in? Or are the opening few bars enough to make you feel tingly?

Despite having no obvious survival value, listening to music can be a highly rewarding activity.

Aug 18th 2014

Pianist Mordecai Shehori’s prodigious output of CDs over the past few years must be setting some kind of record. Almost every piece of the piano repertoire he has studied throughout his long career is being preserved for posterity, now amounting to 31 CDs.

Aug 14th 2014

The past may be a foreign country, but in terms of war, they do not do things differently there; death is death at any time and in any language.

No other work in the Classical repertoire could be more topical or appropriate in commemorating the centenary of the Great War than Benjamin Brit

Jul 19th 2014

An interview by Ivan Ilic. 

Jul 17th 2014

Chinese pianist Ernest So’s eclectic tastes set him apart from the current run of young Asian keyboard superstars now filling concert halls around the world. He has the technical brilliance of the best of them but more importantly he is a discerning student of the repertoire.

Jul 13th 2014

Gregg Lehrman is a composer and entrepreneur who has helped score music for a number of big TV shows and films.

Jun 9th 2014

The Bach suites for solo cello can leave you suffused, body and soul, with their plangent resonances if you allow them to. These six intimate pieces seem conceived to exploit the sensual nature of the cello.

Jun 5th 2014

When British music lecturer Julia Winterson offered composer John Cage a cup of coffee, he just looked at her. Ms. Winterson, recalling the 1989 encounter, said she thought maybe he hadn’t heard her or didn’t understand her Yorkshire accent.

Jun 1st 2014

A new CD from Ivan Ilic, the Serbian-American pianist based in France, offers a most refreshing change of pace from the current crop of young keyboard speedsters and clavier hammerers.

May 25th 2014

Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never be Defeated is one of those pieces that seems to have popped or plopped out whole and near perfect.

May 23rd 2014

With a selection of three rarely recorded piano pieces, the great neglected American composer Frederic Rzewski surges back into view this spring on a new CD from the Naxos “American Classics” series.  Where has he been these past few years?

May 21st 2014

Robert Beaser is one of our very strongest composers.

May 19th 2014

John Adams is one of the most frequently performed of American composers and justly so.

May 16th 2014
As an arts snob, I had never paid much attention to Irish traditional music but here, in a new CD called “Sleepsongs” (Heresy 014, U.S. distribution by Naxos), the lovely Irish singer Caitriona O’Leary’s calming voice overwhelms from the first track onward.
May 13th 2014

Of the perhaps inappropriately named New York School, I find Earle Brown's the most musically rich and articulate. Sign Sounds is for a small chamber orchestra.

May 9th 2014

My friend Stephen Albert once said that he couldn't imagine writing a string quartet after those of Bartok.

Apr 18th 2014

The $10,000 Music Pulitzer Prize went this year to Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, launching a heated debate in the music world over who was – or wasn’t – most deserving of this perpetually controversial award.

Apr 15th 2014

Contrary to many keyboard artists, pianist William Grant Naboré seems perfectly at home with Beethoven’s daunting Diabelli Variations.

Mar 11th 2014
The expatriate young pianist Mauro Bertoli, now artist in residence at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, brings his feathery Italian touch to a new CD, Italian Memories, featuring his personal collection of little-known Italian keyboard works.

His timeline stretches

Mar 3rd 2014

Every few years, music lovers should try to attend a live performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphonie. Not just to clean one’s pipes but to be reminded what a composer’s volcanic imagination can do with an orchestra.