The Cliburn and the IMF, 2017

Published: June 04, 2017

June 5, 2017.  The Cliburn and the IMF.  The 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is entering its final round: the six finalists will be announced later today.  Every lover of classical music in this country is aware of the Cliburn, the premier piano competition organized International Music Foundationby the late Van Cliburn in 1962, four years after he won the first Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow.  Many of the Cliburn winner and even participants who didn’t get top prizes went on to develop great careers: Nikolai Petrov, Radu Lupu, Rudolf Buchbinder, Cristina Oriz, Vladimir Viardo, Barry Douglas, Olga Kern, Aleksey Sultanov, to name just a few.  While the Cliburn is known worldwide, the International Music Foundation, a Chicago organization that presents high-quality music performances by emerging artists and supports music education in the area, isn’t well known even in its home city.  And yet, Chicagoans can listen live to some of the best young pianists who are today performing in Fort Worth: the flagship program of the IMF is the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, and many of its “alumni” went on to participate in and win major music competitions.  This year, three such musicians, Daniel Hsu, Georgy Tchaidze and Rachel Kudo played at the Cliburn.  All three made it to the quarterfinals, while Hsu and Tchaidze went a step further, to the semifinals.  Today we’ll find out if they make it into the final round.  The 19-year-old Daniel Hsu is a native of San-Francisco.  At the age of 10 he was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with Garry Graffman and Eleanor Sokoloff.  He was named a Gilmore Young Artist in 2016 and a year later played a concert at Carnegie Hall.  In the preliminary round of the Cliburn, Daniel The Cliburn Competitionplayed Beethoven’s 31st piano sonata.  Earlier this year, he played the same sonata at the Dame Myra Hess concert; you can listen to it here.  In the quarterfinals, he played Bach’s Chaconne from the violin Partita in d minor, BWV 1004, arranged for the piano by Ferruccio Busoni.  You can listen to it in a live recording, here.

Georgy Tchaidze was born in Saint Petersburg and studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Sergey Dorensky.  He then moved to Berlin where he continued his studies with Klaus Hellwig at the Berlin University of the Arts.  Georgy is a winner of several international competitions and performed across Europe, North America and China.  Here he’s collaborating with the German-Korean violinist Clara-Jumi Kang in Johannes Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano, Op. 78 in G Major.

Rachel Kudo was born in Washington DC.  She attended the Juilliard and currently works with Leon Fleisher.  She also studied with Joseph Kalichstein, Richard Goode, and Gilbert Kalish.  Like Daniel Hsu, Ms. Kudo is a winner of the Gilmore Young Artist Award and a two-time winner of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition.  It so happens that we have her recording of Johannes Brahms’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in A Major, Op. 100, which she performed with the violinist Siwoo Kim.  It’s a fine compliment to Brahms’s first violin sonata.  You can listen to Violin Sonata no. 2 here.

Robert Schumann was born this week, on June 8th of 1810.  We’ll celebrate him another time.

Classical
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