This is not your grandparents’ Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
There was a day when the final round of the most famous musical scrimmage of the Americas, held in Fort Worth, Texas, was pretty close to a looped sequence of the Second and Third Piano Concertos of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, and the inevitable First Piano Concerto of Tchaikovsky.
Now the net is cast wide. The six contenders unveiled Monday will play 10 different concertos in the Bass Performance Hall with Marin Alsop and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Which is to say there are only two repetitions — of Beethoven’s matchlessly poetic Piano Concerto No. 4, by 26-year-old Evren Ozel and his fellow American, 22-year-old Angel Stanislav Wang; and of Prokofiev’s burly Second Concerto, by the 26-year-old Russian, Philipp Lynov, and Carter Johnson, 28, a native of Vancouver Island and the lone Canadian in the running.
Not that the works heard in four sessions starting Tuesday and ending Saturday could be called unfamiliar. Lynov and Johnson will offer, respectively, Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. As for those beloved barnburners, Tchaikovsky 1 and Rachmaninoff 3 — the concertos commandeered by Van Cliburn himself in his celebrated victory in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 — they will be given by Ozel (Tchaikovsky) and Wang (Rachmaninoff).
Aristo Sham of China is first up Tuesday night with Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, a prolix work that is heard less often than it used to be. On Friday this 29-year-old offers another German score of the 19th century, Brahms’s four-movement Piano Concerto No. 2. (It should probably be clarified at this point that each finalist plays two concertos, on different days, chosen from separate lists, a system designed to encourage variety.)
Vitaly Starikov, at 30 the oldest competitor to make the finals, has selected the challenging pairing of Bartók’s tough-as-nails Second Piano Concerto and Schumann’s probing but elusive essay in the form, which was memorably described to me in 2008 by a competition judge at the Concours de musique international de Montréal as “a death trap.” Starikov lists Russia and Israel as the nations to which he is attached.
Sticklers for quotas will note that there are no women among the six finalists. Chaeyoung Park, 27, one of two female semifinalists not to make the cut, was also the only South Korean semifinalist — a low tally given the worldwide dominance of this nation in competitions, not least the Cliburn, which awarded gold to Yekwon Sunwoo in 2017 and Yunchan Lim in 2022.
Conspiracy theories are devilishly hard to sustain in Fort Worth. The judges sit in monastic seclusion and do not confer with their colleagues.
“No discussion, no deliberation,” said Jacques Marquis, Cliburn chief executive since 2013, and a Canadian, in a Facebook post. “A yes/no/maybe process. Simple and efficient.
“As I said many times, I do not want a blend, I want nine distinct opinions from nine concert pianists.”
Still, it is interesting to speculate on how the British-born jury chair Paul Lewis, a pianist noted for his Schubert, feels about the cascades of double octaves that inevitably accompany a Cliburn contestant to the finish line. One can imagine a certain amount of unspoken convergence with his fellow juror Till Fellner, an Austrian who is, like Lewis, a former student of Alfred Brendel.
Despite the rigour of the Cliburn process, there has been some online unhappiness over the early elimination of Magdalene Ho, a Malaysian pianist of American birth and British upbringing. “She showed more character than all the rest put together,” commented the British critic Norman Lebrecht on his widely read website Slipped Disc.
An interesting subset of the Ho controversy was a demand by her fan base to install her in the quarterfinal spot bizarrely abandoned by Xiaofu Ju, a 25-year-old Chinese pianist who walked on stage, sat before the keyboard, stared at his hands, stood again, bowed and left the stage. The news dispatch from the Cliburn cited “medical reasons” for his withdrawal.
The search for something to be grumpy about is inevitably subsumed in the final days by the sheer excitement of the home stretch. For many listeners, national or ethnic favouritism probably plays a role. What Canadian in an age of resurgent nationalism can fail to cheer on Johnson, even if (as a resident of Connecticut) he lists a dual affiliation with the United States and Canada?
With a creative approach to repertoire (his solo rounds included sonatas by Muzio Clementi and Paul Hindemith) and a taste for assertive ornamentation in the mandatory Mozart Concerto (in his case, No. 22 in E flat K. 482), this pianist has as good a chance as any to medal.
I have heard something about a hockey game on Wednesday night. Have to miss it. Carter Johnson is playing Prokofiev.
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