Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition (Final Round & Results)
—Wayne Lee Gay
It wasn't planned that way, but the luck of the draw brought four performances of the third movement of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 (along with two other concerto movements) to the final round of the eighth edition of the Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition. When the dust cleared at Bass Performance Hall, American software engineer Jon Lee, 41, a resident of San Francisco and graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took away first prize and a cash award of $2,000.
Tuesday's concert was the final stop in a long journey that began over two years ago, when 59 competitively selected (and very serious) amateur pianists were named to appear in the competition, initially scheduled for summer of 2020. Pandemic intervened, and it was only last week that the chosen competitors arrived in Fort Worth.
In this event, Fort Worth's Van Cliburn Foundation (the main function of which is to present, every four years, one of the world's most significant professional piano competitions) shines its spotlight instead on those talented, thoroughly trained pianists who choose career paths outside of professional music-making. The message is clear: piano music isn't just about the superstars who play Carnegie and Wigmore Halls; it's also about the amateurs and music lovers who fill the seats—and who practice their own devotion to the art, each in his or her own way.
Each of the contestants who came to Fort Worth last week from 16 countries had selected, for the final round, one work from a broad-ranging but specific list of movements from standard repertoire concertos. Pure coincidence resulted in the plethora of performances of that one movement from Prokofiev among the six finalists who made it through the preliminary and semi-final rounds.
And it's not a surprising choice. Prokofiev’s Third, completed in 1921 while the composer was in temporary exile from post-Revolutionary Russia, was immensely popular in symphonic concerts throughout the middle and later years of the 20th century, thanks to its skillful embrace of grand romanticism on one hand and lively modernism on the other. Though it waned in prominence in recent decades, Tuesday's performances demonstrated the work's enduring appeal.
Eventual champion Lee opened the evening, joining the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the orchestra's music director laureate Miguel Harth-Bedoya (currently director of orchestral studies at Baylor University). Lee delivered a strong rhythmic pulse and a beautifully rich tone, particularly in the grand second theme. Michael Savin, 71, a retired neuro-ophthamologist from Manhasset, New York, followed with exquisitely shaped phrasing and impressive balance of humor and majesty in the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. Savin took second prize, an encore of his placement in the 2016 Amateur Competition.
Parisian marketing director Xavier Aymonod, 46, presented the evening's second performance of the Prokofiev with a decidedly cool, French approach, downplaying the work's passions in favor of its elegance. Aymonod walked away with third prize at the end of the evening.
Masanori Murakami, 38, a clinical project manager from Tokyo, gave what was to my ears the finest performance of the evening in his confident, stylistically on-target delivery of the Prokofiev. The audience apparently agreed with me in selecting Murakami for the special audience award (which included, along with $500 cash, a cowboy hat from the Justin Boot Company).
Ukrainian Dmytro Vynogradov, 52, a business development manager from Kiev, brought a gorgeous tone to the finale of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. Lebanese-born Dominique Salloum, 53, the CEO of the BIOptimize artificial intelligence company in Paris, discovered an appealingly savage energy in the Prokofiev movement, demonstrating yet another aspect of that masterpiece.
Throughout the evening, the Fort Worth Symphony and conductor Harth-Bedoya collaborated admirably and empathetically, with Harth-Bedoya holding a steady hand on the rudder through some occasional memory slips from the soloists.
Pamela Mia Paul, concert pianist and Regents Professor of Piano at the University of North Texas, served as chairman of the jury, which also included pianists Peter Czornyj, Alessandro Deljavan, Carol Leone of the faculty of Southern Methodist University, Alex McDonald, Spencer Myer, and 1993 Cliburn silver medalist Valery Kuleshov. In addition to the top prizes and honors for the other finalists, the jury designated discretionary awards to competitor Deirbhile Brennan, 53, of Dublin, Ireland; Sean Sutherland, 45, of Toronto, Canada; and American Noah DeGarmo, 44, a Dallas physician.
