By Lyn Bronson
JUNE 7, 2009, FORT WORTH, TEXAS–Tonight, the Van Cliburn Foundation announced the winners of the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The announcement, made by Van Cliburn during the Awards Ceremony at the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, was the culmination of seventeen exciting days of extraordinary music making.
The 2009 Cliburn winners are:
Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medalists (tie for first):
Mr. Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20 (Japan)
Mr. Haochen Zhang, 19 (China)
The First Prize includes the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medal; a cash award of $20,000; international and national concert tours for the three seasons following the competition, coordinated by the Van Cliburn Foundation in conjunction with IMG Artists Europe; a CD recording on the Harmonia Mundi USA label; performance attire provided by Neiman Marcus; and a contribution toward domestic and international air travel on American Airlines during the three-year tour.
Mr. Tsujii and Mr. Zhang were the two youngest pianists in the 2009 Competition.
The last time that the Cliburn Competition awarded a tie for the gold medal was in 2001, to Stanislav Ioudenitch and Olga Kern.
Rudolf Schroeter, a member of the board of the Carmel Music Society and the Mozart Series, is presently negotiating with the Van Cliburn Foundation to bring Gold Medal Winner Tsujii to perform in Sunset Center on the Carmel Music Society’s 2011-2012 season. Mr. Schroeter has attended the Cliburn Competition several times in the past, but this year elected to stay at home and view the competition live on the TV webcast seen by millions around the world. That all seventeen days were broadcast live of all the recitals, concertos and chamber music rounds, made the Van Cliburn Competition this year as much a piano festival as it was a piano competition.
Co-Gold Medal winner Tsujii (pronounced “Soo-JEE-yee”) made an amazing impression early in the competition. Blind since birth, he learns music not through Braille, but by using his extraordinary memory to hear a piece, memorize it, and then to mold and refine it to make it uniquely his own. In the preliminary round he performed the twelve Chopin Etudes, Op. 10 in their entirety, and impressed the audience with his absolute mastery of the etudes, plus his beautifully musical approach that never sacrificed musical elements for virtuosity. Similarly, in the following round, he performed Beethoven’s gigantic Hammerklavier Sonata, a work that even Artur Schnabel considered almost impossible to perform, and Tsujii’s masterful performance astounded the audience. It is an amazing feat for a 20-year-old to conquer this work with its extraordinary technical and musical demands, but to hear a blind 20-year-old perform it like a mature master brought the audience to its feet in a near hysterical ovation.
Many in the audience wondered how a blind person would be able to play chamber music and concertos. Since the rehearsals for all chamber music and concerto performances were also broadcast, we observed how visual cues were replaced by subtle intakes of breath that worked like a charm.
Judge for yourself! All of Tsujii’s performances during the competition are archived and can be heard on http://www.cliburn.tv/
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