It’s a tough task picking 24 pianists for the second round of the Dublin International Piano Competition – but not for the reasons you might think
THE FIGURES ARE staggering. Estimates for the number of Chinese children learning the piano seem to begin at around 30 million. As the New Yorker’s Alex Ross put it in 2008, “Between 30 million and 100 million children are said to be learning piano, violin, or both, depending on which source you consult.” Those numbers can only have risen since then.
Back in 1988, when the first Dublin International Piano Competition took place, there was just one competitor from China and three from Korea. This year five from China and eight from Korea cleared the pre-selection process and turned up to play at the RDS. Between them the two countries accounted for one in four of the 51 pianists who performed in the first round.
The growth is quite simply a reflection of the fact that the standard of playing from Asian competitors has risen phenomenally over the 25 years since the competition was first announced in 1987. It wasn’t until 1997, when the fourth competition took place, that an Asian player first made it into the finals, with Japan’s Seiko Tsukamoto taking the sixth prize. Three years later, Taiwan’s Chiao-Ying Chang took the second prize, and in 2009 four of the six final places went eastwards. The pattern of success has continued this year, with the Asian presence rising from one in four in round one to four in 10 in round two.
The first round of the piano competition is, from a listener’s point of view, the most intense. I spent the bank holiday weekend in a hothouse atmosphere that saw all 51 competitors offering 30 minutes of self-chosen repertoire. And, for the first time in the Dublin competition, all of them played the same Steinway concert grand – previous competitions had at least two pianos (the second a Kawai) and some even had three (adding Yamaha to the mix). It’s always been one of the wonders of piano competitions how different two performers can make the same instrument sound, and the use of just a single instrument made that wonder even more pronounced this time around.
Reducing the 51 of round one to the 24 of round two is something I always find impossible, although not for what might seem the most obvious reason. My difficulty is not who to exclude, but rather finding 24 I actually want to hear again. This year, when I included maybes, I got up to 21, and of those 21 just nine received the nod from the jury.
The ones I’ll miss include: Beatrice Berrut (27, Switzerland), who treated Brahms’s Piano Pieces, Op 118, with a big-boned honesty; Yulia Chaplina (24, Russia), whose thoughtful take on Liszt’s great Sonata in B minor was unexpectedly light in any number of ways; Alessandro Deljavan Farshi (25, Italy), whose playing of Chopin’s Op 25 Studies was of a characterful richness that could have fired countless musical debates; Nicholas King (22, US), whose handling of Liszt’s Rigoletto Paraphrase showed a grasp of vocal line that other competitors missed in this piece, and also gave a lovely account of Busoni’s magical arrangement of Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir; Scipione Sangiovanni (24, Italy), whose extremely personal playing of Bach’s Partita in E minor caused both infuriation and delight; and Benjamin Shaffrey (21, Ireland), who showed a distinct affinity for the perfumed colours of Messiaen in Le Baiser de l’Enfant Jésus, and whose admittedly flawed account of Liszt’s Après une lecture de Dante constituted a kind of blessed relief from the excesses that this particular piece provoked in a number of other performers.
There were a number of interesting players from my overlap with the jury’s choices. Andrey Gugnin (25, Russia) took a leaf out of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s book, and offered an enchantingly delicate view of Galuppi’s Sonata No 5 in C, and followed it with some of the most magisterial and dramatic Scriabin playing I’ve ever heard at the competition. Most Scriabin playing falls into a category you could describe as aspirational, striving towards a goal that’s never going to be reached in a way that can make the music seem inadequate. Gugnin’s approach to the Third Sonata brought everything into focus. Simply put, he delivered.
Reinis Zarins (27, Latvia) contrasted Bach (two parts of The Art of Fugue) with Messiaen’s Regard du Fils sur le Fils and Par Lui tout a été fait, taking full ownership of the two composer’s styles in a way that was totally absorbing. It was a high-contrast strategy that stood out for both its daring and success.
Steven Lin (23, US) took huge risks in Bach’s French Overture, with a harpsichord-like sharpness of attack, extraordinarily deft ornamentation, unexpected embellishments and a stirring grasp of rhetoric. I wondered if some of his speeds would upset the jury, but his courage clearly won the day on this occasion. Ji Liu (22, China) made Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque sound sheerly lovely, and went for high contrast – a tried and trusted programming strategy – by following up with an incisive delivery of Prokofiev’s rarely-heard Études, Op 2.
Alexia Mouzá (22, Greece) was the player who showed the best native grasp of gracefulness in playing Haydn, and her handling of the Sonata in C, Hob XVI: 50 also showed fine judgment in its balance of firmness and freedom. Her playing of Chopin’s Étude in C minor, Op 25 No 12 had a warmth that probably did no favours to Farshi’s earlier and more aggressive approach. And the fantasy she brought to Prokofiev’s Third Sonata produced elfin grace and mystery as well as genuine violence.
The other players who made it through to the second round are Jason Bae (20, New Zealand), Alexander Bernstein (23, US), Jenny Chen (18, Taiwan), Mladen Colic (29, France), Qiaojing Dai (21, China), Nadene Fiorentini (22, Ireland), Berenika Glixman (28, Israel), Chi Ho Han (20, Korea), Jae-Weon Huh (25, Korea), Daiki Kato (22, Japan), Nikolay Khozyainov (19, Russia), Radoslaw Kurek (28, Poland), Andrejs Osokins (27, Latvia), Sun-A Park (24, US), William Cahill Smith (26, US), Hyung-Min Suh (21, Korea), Jiayan Sun (22, China), Avan Yu (24, Canada), and Zhang Zuo (23, China). The competition’s second round is at the RDS today and tomorrow; the semi-finals are at the NCH on Saturday and Sunday; and the finals, with just four players this year, are at the NCH next Tuesday.
