Cliburn: After Words…
—Jan Farrington
On the last day of the final round of the Van Cliburn piano competition, a woman in blue walked up to the lip of the stage—and gave Ukrainian finalist Dymytro Choni a bouquet of deep yellow sunflowers as a tribute too Choni’s beleaguered home country.
At the opening moments of the announcement ceremony in Bass Performance Hall a few hours later, a figure moved in the dark to a piano at center stage. When the lights came up, 2013 Cliburn gold medalist, Kyiv native Vadym Kholodenko, played the national anthem of Ukraine as the audience quietly stood up to honor the moment.
Politics hovered at the edges of this year’s sixteenth Cliburn competition—but never got the better of the music.
Four of the six finalists had roots leading to countries in the orbit of the current conflict—two from Russia, one from nearby Belarus, one from Ukraine. But after the medals and prizes were given, all said the music took first place in their thoughts and dreams.
The three winners, looking pleased but tired, met the press after the medals ceremony for a short conference.
Gold medal winner Yuncham Lim of South Korea—at age 18 the youngest gold medalist ever for the Cliburn—spoke shyly and quietly through an interpreter, saying he would need to talk with his teacher back home before deciding how, exactly, he’s going to handle this explosion of fame and opportunities. The Cliburn gold medal comes with $100, 000, Neiman Marcus couture, and three years of artistic management and bookings for concerts both in the U.S. and overseas.
It’s a lot for a very young man who, in the hall earlier, had been swarmed by teen (and pre-teen!) young ladies looking to meet him.
Bronze medal winner Dymytro Choni, 28, has family back in Kyiv and the environs, and was reluctant to talk about the political situation. It’s clearly weighing on him, but he is determined to be “sincere” in his music, and to let its vision speak for him. It may be only my fancy, but in the melody lines of Choni’s final performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, I briefly heard the tune of the Irish resistance song “A Nation Once Again” (a theme borrowed from Mozart, so Beethoven would certainly have known it)—and it all seemed to fit.
Silver medalist Anna Geniushene, 31, spoke to a question about how “surprised” (or not) the three winners might be at their success. “I’m still quite surprised,” she laughed. “The more I advanced [in the Cliburn], the more I was surprised, and overwhelmed by the emotions.”
At some point during the competition, it was revealed that Geniushene is pregnant, also a first for the Cliburn, we think. She and her husband Lukas Geniusas, himself a silver medalist of the Tchaikovsky competition, have an 18-month-old son. They upended their lives in early March,when they decided to cross the Russian border into Lithuania (her husband is a dual citizen) during the first days after the invasion.
Geniushene said confidently that she’d kept doing concerts during her first pregnancy—and this one shouldn’t be any different. Still, she made it clear that a household with small children and two concert-level pianists isn’t a simple proposition. Beyond differences in opinion about how to play particular pieces, there’s always the musical question: “Who will practice, and who will take care of the baby?”
Congratulations to the three medalists, and to each of the 30 participants who made this year’s Cliburn exciting and pleasurable. The eyes of North Texas are upon you—and we’ll be watching with excitement to see where you go, and what “all y’all” do next!
