Next week, a handful of today's most promising young pianists will gather in Fort Worth, Texas, to reveal their immense musical talents to the world. Modestly described as 'a cross between the Miss America Pageant, the Olympic Games, the Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize' by the Boston Globe, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is the most prestigious of its kind in the world.
The competition takes place once every four years. If, like me, you're unable to hop on a plane, I have good news. All stages of the Thirteenth competition are going to be shown live on the internet, free of charge. The Cliburn website will also feature blogs, and additional educational activities and webcasts. (Streaming videos of solo recitals from the Twelfth Competition are also available online.)
If you'd like to follow the competition online, a full schedule can be found here. And if you miss any of the performances, they will be available on the competition's website afterwards as archived videos. The main stages are:
- Preliminary Round (May 22nd - 26th): One hundred and fifty five pianists have been whittled down to just thirty, after a series of public recitals in China, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. Each will perform a fifty-minute recital.
- Semi-final Round (May 28th – 31st): In addition to giving a sixty-minute recital, the twelve remaining competitors will perform piano quintets with the Takács Quartet. Some of the finest moments in the competition can occur in these eight sessions.
- Final Round (June 3rd – 7th): In addition to yet another solo recital, the remaining six competitors will share the stage with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra (led by James Conlon), performing concertos by Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
- Awards Ceremony (June 7th): After seventeen days the Chairman of the Jury will call the winners onto the stage, and Van Cliburn himself will bestow the medals. All six finalists receive managed concert tours valued at more than $1,000,000.
UPDATE:
Did you know, the average age of this year's competitors is 24.6 and the average age at which they gave their first public performance was 10? There's a one-in-three chance they were born in Asia, and that they've already released a recording!
UPDATE II:
Twenty-eight new compositions were submitted to the jury, and four have been selected for the semi-final round: White Lies for Lomax by Mason Bates, Turning by Derek Bermel, Suite for Piano by Daron Hagen and Improvisation & Fugue by John Musto.
UPDATE III:
The competition is now underway, and a live video stream of all the performances (and some rehearsals) is available here. Each program is immediately archived for on-demand viewing, especially helpful for those of us watching here in the UK!
You can vote during each round of the competition, read the competition blog, send e-mails to the competitors and read written commentaries as you watch. If you'd like to follow my own news and commentary over the next seventeen days, please click here.
UPDATE IV:
After seventeen days of extraordinary music-making, the Van Cliburn Foundation has announced the winners of this year's competition. Congratulations to Haochen Zhang and Nobuyuki Tsujii, who both won Gold Medals, and Yeol Eum Son, who won Silver.
Zhang and Tsujii were the two youngest pianists in the 2009 Competition, aged nineteen and twenty respectively. The last time that the Cliburn Foundation awarded a tie for the gold medal was in 2001, to Stanislav Ioudenitch and Olga Kern.
