The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Here are the three winners – Ukrainian, Italian and American — of the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition that concluded Sunday night in Fort Worth, Texas.

By Jacob Stockinger

We have a winner!

Actually, we have three of them (below in a photo by Tom Fox) – one Ukrainian (first place, center), one Italian (second place, on left) and one American (third place, on right).

After two weeks of preliminaries, semi-finals and finals, the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, has come to its conclusion. It ended with concertos and the official announcement Sunday night.

It is the first competition, now in its 52nd year, to be held after the death of its namesake, the world-famous pianist Van Cliburn (at bottom, at the first Tchaikovsky Competition, which he won against all odds, in Moscow in 1958) who died in February at 78 of bone cancer.

Here is a previous posting I did about the competition with many other links:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/classical-music-after-the-recent-death-of-van-cliburn-the-14th-van-cliburn-international-piano-competition-is-being-held-may-24-june-9-in-fort-worth-texas-here-are-links-to-many-kinds-of-informati/

Other changes, including bigger prizes, were also made with this competition, which is held every four years. But apparently, it was a fine success on many counts.

Here are several links to stories that include a variety of background and details:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/06/10/189511177/ukrainian-wins-top-prize-at-van-cliburn-piano-competition

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/vadym-kholodenko-ukrainian-pianist-and-cliburn-winner_n_3414712.html?utm_hp_ref=arts

http://www.classical-music.com/news/kholodenko-takes-van-cliburn-glory

And here is a link to the photo portfolio from the competition with a lot of thankful tweets from fans who follow the various rounds of the competition:

http://www.cliburn.org/landing.html

Here is the terrifically designed logo for the competition that turns Van Cliburn’s initials sideways into a piano:

And here are some observations by Scott Cantrell, the classical music critic for the Dallas Morning News who clearly dislikes percussive piano playing, about the performances of the three winners plus a photo gallery, with detailed IDs, by staff photographer Tom Fox:

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/columnists/scott-cantrell/20130609-ukrainian-pianist-vadym-kholodenko-claims-cliburn-competition-s-first-prize.ece