Passion and Musicianship Unite Concours Finalists a World Apart
More than the elite musicianship its contestants have already attained, more than note-perfect performance of difficult repertoire, a first-rate piano competition aims to deliver something a bit grittier than that capacity alone.
All eight finalists in the Concours Musical International de Montreal, which starts Monday and concludes Friday in concert halls around the world, got there by way of superb prestidigitation and a preternatural ear. Jurists will rank highest the performer who has shown all of that plus readiness to handle the larger audiences a win at this level tends to preordain.
CMIM moved this year’s piano competition online to maximize safety in a pandemic. Pulling that off meant bringing in visual and sound engineers to ensure technical equanimity in each remote location, originally 15 concert stages around the world.
Finalists will each perform one 60-minute recital Monday through Wednesday, which must include one work by J.S. Bach and three of the 24 preludes by Canadian composer John Burge. The winner earns a concerto performance with the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal, plus a solo album on the Steinway & Sons record label, part of a benefits package totaling more than $180,000.
Canadian pianist Alice Burla will play first on May 10. Burla opened her semi-final recital with Josef Haydn’s Sonata in G Major, piloting its shifting tempos with gentle authority. She similarly navigated three pieces by Hungarian Romantic composer Ernst von Dohnányi, from a dancing impromptu launching pad to suddenly revealed depths and a reflective coda. Her versatility and technical mastery dominated through a Béla Bartók dance suite, balancing fluidity and tension.
Next up is Japanese-born Marcel Tadokoro who started piano lessons at age 8. He has since accumulated awards and won training opportunities in Germany, Russia and France. Tadokoro now lives in France, where he won a Clavicologne International Piano Competition and placed in the Concours, both in 2018.
Tadokoro engaged with intimate detail in his semi-final opening piece by French Baroque composer François Couperin. It was a joyous rendering, his right hand carrying exuberant melodies, seamlessly accompanied by the left.
His subsequent selections were no less impressive, picking up the pace with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Six variations on F major, finding dark slivers in otherwise light passages. He segued into Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, caressing its dissonances and deceptive cadences with stream-of-consciousness intensity.
From the bubbly allegro of Bach's Italian Concerto to Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F minor, South Korean pianist Su Yeon Kim established an uncanny mastery of timing and technical prowess, all without losing an ounce of exuberance.
A graduate of the Korean Institute for the Gifted in Arts, Kim studied with celebrated Korean-born pianist Robert Choong-Mo Kang. She won the Johann Nepomuk Hummel International Competition in 2014, for pianists under age 32. In 2018, Kim also took second and third place, respectively, in the Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition and the Alaska International e-Piano Competition.
She followed up the Ballade with two more Chopin pieces, handling the racing arpeggios in Nocturne No. 2 in F-sharp minor and bucketsful more in Scherzo No. 3.
Kim wrapped up the semi-final recital with Sergei Prokofiev's Sonata No. 3 in A minor, five fast minutes during which every part of the Steinway she was using got an intense workout.
Following Kim on May 11 will be Chaeyoung Park, also of South Korea, who looks to be another very serious contender. Park won a young artists’ competition in 2017 to study at the Juilliard School and has since won the Hilton Head International Piano Competition in 2019.
In the semi-finals she presented a Haydn sonata -- steady, expressive -- followed by Bartók’s Out of Doors, which demands speed, forcefulness and an aural ambush akin to a roadside bomb. It was, in other words, an ambitious bid backed by a complete intention and spotless execution.
Yoichiro Chiba, a Tokyo native who graduated in 2020 from Tokyo University of the Arts, leads off the May 12 pairing. He opened the semis with Bach’s Partita in C Minor, played with a smoothness that belied (and arguably short changed) opportunities to find multiple voices in conversational melodies. Instead, he followed the notations to increase or reduce volume without articulating any reason for doing so. Chalk that up to a missed opportunity.
Chiba took second prize in two piano competitions in Japan. He also took a shot at the next level with Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, an enigmatic and difficult piece that takes a half-hour to play. Chiba dove into the crevices of ambiguity and lovingly explored each one.
Ying Li, of China, has devoted nearly all of her life to the piano. She started studying at age 5, and her semi-final performance was filled with the gleaming results of her dedication. She too presented judges with stylistic contrasts, but it takes a certain self-assuredness to know you could dazzle with technical chops and instead aim for something subtler and deeper.
That's what Li did by following Bach's English Suite No. 3 with the Claude Debussy's Images, Book 1. Anyone who enters intending to evaluate her technique or artistry could lose the thread – as I admittedly did – and get swept away by the music.
A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, Li is pursuing a master's degree at The Juilliard School. The list of her recitals in major cities keeps growing, as have opportunities to perform her beloved chamber music and at music festivals and orchestras in the United States and abroad.
A consistent interpretive quality and meticulous exposition cannot be hidden, of course. She closed the semi-final with Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7, also known as the “unquiet allegro” for its churning, thunderous darkness and unpredictability. Li should not be counted out here.
The May 13 program starts with another musician on the fast track. Dimitri Malignan’s semi-final recital included Johannes Brahms’ Variations on a theme by Robert Schumann. The tension in the piece was running through the Schumann household and the composer himself in 1854, the summer in which boatmen rescued him from a suicide attempt in the Rhine River. Malignan brought that existential dynamic tension into his performance, the mood of it flickering like a dimmer switch adjusted up or down, almost by the second. He capped that off with two Rachmaninoff preludes.
Born in Paris, Malignan has given recitals in many European capitals, including Konzerthaus Berlin, Athenium Bucharest and Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields London. Competition highlights include unanimous first-place votes in 2016 and 2017. In 2020 he played a two-piano concert in Italy with Canadian-born pianist Angela Hewitt. Malignan’s training includes six years of study with French pianist Jean-Paul Sevilla, Hewitt’s mentor.
Performances conclude Thursday with Francesco Granata, who has been playing solo recitals and chamber music concerts through Europe and in India since age 8, and as a concert soloist since 13.
A 2016 graduate of the Milan Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, he subsequently trained at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the 2019 Accademia di Musica Pinerolo. He has won two piano competitions in his native Italy,and is a laureate of the International Summer Academy of the Mozarteum Salzburg.
In last week’s semi-finals, a movement from Maurice Ravel's Miroirs bristled with the composer’s impressionistic energy and mechanical precision, but also benefited from attention Granata paid to the slightest shifts in tone or mood. He finished with three movements of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird, transmitting the turbulent magic of the solo version by Guido Agosti with a ministerial commitment, although the power and intensity could still be turned up a notch.
I note mannerisms in and around performances of all the semi-finalists – semiconsciously practiced routines and physical expressions of personality are part of how musicians focus and channel their energies. Pianists are storytellers who signal the relative importance of the notes they are playing. Seeing that happen is what makes concerts special.
But that fact brings the importance of the visual in evaluating any pianist’s performance, live or remotely. A 2013 study by the UCL School of Management followed musical novices and professional musicians observing piano competitions, asking them to predict the winner.
The study found that subjects accurately guessed winners nearly half the time when watching pianists but without sound. Only 20 percent could do so based on sound-only recordings. The pattern tracked across all 10 competitions observed. Results remained consistent regardless of whether study subjects had formal musical training or were novices, though both groups overwhelmingly thought sound was the most important factor to them in guessing who would win.
“The results show that even when we want to be objective in evaluating the sound of music, when it comes to live performance, the visual experience can be the most influential aspect,” Chia-Jung Tsay, the study’s author, said in 2013.
It’s unclear what to make of that now. Speculation about extra-musical influences on judging is not exactly new. While a useful caution against emotion, the idea of attending a competition while refusing to look at performers doesn’t make a lot of sense.
At least, not with this competition. There is too much wonderful music to hear -- perhaps even to see -- from artists the world will surely see more from. Finals performances will air at 10 and 11 a.m. May 10-14. Stream it live here.
Andrew Meacham is a writer in St. Petersburg, Fla. He worked for the Tampa Bay Times from 2005 to 2018, retiring as the paper’s performing arts critic.
