Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Van Cliburn

The 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is now complete and, as always, the music it produced was spectacular. There is a first this year, however. For the first time, pianists from east Asia took the top prizes.

A Japanese and a Chinese spit top honors, and just to round off the East Asian sweep, 2nd place was awarded to a South Korean. Oh, and to top it off, the Japanese is totally blind!

YouTube videos
1st place:
Nobuyuki Tsujii
Haochen Zhang

2nd place:
Yeol Eum Son

And for those that think classical piano is just for and by stodgy boring people, here's a video clip of Di Wu, another contender for this year's prize. She didn't win the competition, but this won my heart.

Long live classical piano!

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