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Preview: An interview with Cleveland International Piano Competition finalists François Dumont and Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev

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by Mike Telin

Francois-ArsenyClevelandClassical had the opportunity to interview all four CIPC finalists in pairs on Thursday in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall before the final rounds on Friday and Saturday. We talked first with 28-year-old François Dumont from France and 20-year-old Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev from Russia. Though they had never met before coming to Cleveland, they sounded like long-time friends during our wide-ranging conversation that covered such topics as family background, how they decided on careers in music, their concerto choices and experiences during the Cleveland Competition and where they’re headed next. And of course we talked about food — always a prime topic among musicians.

Both pianists encountered music at an early age. “I don’t come from a musical family,” François noted, “but they always loved music and brought me to concerts and there was always a lot of classical music in the house.” Arseny, on the other hand, has some distinguished performers in his family tree. “We always had a lot of recordings in the house so I listened to them since I was two years old and I just loved it,” he told us. “So around four years old my mom started to teach me in a playful way.” [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Semi-Final Round, Day Two (August 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

C13 Treutler-AnnikaOn Wednesday, with the moment of decision only hours away, the last four pianists in the semi-final round stepped up to the Hamburg Steinway in Gartner Auditorium to vie for a slot in the final round with The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday and Saturday night.

Annika Treutler (23, Germany) assembled a program of Haydn, Hindemith, Scriabin, Chopin and Liszt for the afternoon’s opening set. Her elegant phrasing, graceful but forceful technique and fine sense of musical line and architecture touched everything she played. Only subtle shadings of color and dynamics differentiated each of Haydn’s f-minor variations from the other. Hindemith’s Suite “1922”, a piece parodying popular dances of the era — which the composer later advised his publisher not to bother to reprint — was far more eventful as Treutler navigated her way through its Marsch, its gloomy, atonal Shimmy, its thick-textured but later sparkling Nachtstück, its waltzy and rhetorical Boston and its uptime Rag, which sported a huge ending. Scriabin’s op. 13 Preludes were by turns rumbling, wistful, ornate and powerful. Treutler played Liszt’s reworkings of Schumann’s songs, Widmung and Frühlingsnacht with grace and agility, and Liszt’s own Hungarian Rhapsody No. 8 with characteristic spirit. The audience enthusiastically applauded after each item in the set. [Read more…]

Report: Cleveland International Piano Competition Festival film — The Art of Chopin (August 7)

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by Guytano Parks

Chopin-PortraitThe Art of Chopin, an hour-long documentary film by Gerald Caillat produced by Euroarts Studio and released in August 2010 to commemorate the great Polish composer’s 200th birthday, was the fifth “Festival Event” presented by The Cleveland International Piano Competition at The Cleveland Museum of Art. The CIPC website describes the film as “a thought-provoking and enlightening film paying tribute to the art of Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), whose unique and inimitable writing laid the groundwork for twentieth century music and the modern piano.”

Garrick Ohlsson, the first American to win the International Frederic Chopin Competition in 1970, provides much of the dialogue during the documentary. Taken aback as he views a video excerpt from his exciting and historic competition winning performance at the onset of the film, he humbly says, “wow — only a few minutes, but such a big part of my life.” [Read more…]

Four advance to finals in the Cleveland International Piano Competition

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CIPC-ButterflyCleveland — August 7

The following four contestants will play in the final rounds with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall.

Friday Night
Finalist 1: François Dumont (Tchaikovsky #1)
Finalist 2: Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev (Rachmaninoff #2)

Saturday Night:
Finalist 3: Jiayan Sun (Tchaikovsky #1)
Finalist 4: Stanislav Khristenko (Brahms #1)

 

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Semi-Final Round, Day One (August 6)

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by Daniel Hathaway

C13 Huang-RuoyuBefore beginning the Semi-Final Round which would bring eight pianists to the Gartner Auditorium stage in afternoon and evening sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday, CIPC executive director Pierre van der Westhuizen invited the audience to treat the one-hour performances as actual concerts and “applaud and cheer” when they felt so moved, an invitation that produced interesting and varied results from the sizeable crowd.

Ruoyu Huang (24, China, left) was first to perform on Tuesday afternoon, beginning with French music — two Debussy Preludes and Ravel’s La Valse — then went on to Schumann’s Davidsbündertänze and Balakirev’s Islamey. Debussy’s Minstrels and Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest presented Huang with the opportunity to paint two different impressionistic scenes that might have been even more vivid had he brought out color and rhythm in the first and played with more sweep and legato in the second. His gloriously virtuosic reading of La Valse was suitably decadent with dramatic ebb and flow and his Schumann visited every emotional level from the dreamy to the passionate. His pianissimo playing was lovely. Festive and characteristic, Huang’s performance of the Balakirev — an unabashed showpiece without a lot of musical content — was a flight of sheer pianism. [Read more…]

Report: Cleveland International Piano Competition Conversation — The Art of Performing Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas (August 6)

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by Guytano Parks

TakacsHans von Bülow called them “The New Testament” of music (Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier being The Old Testament) and was the first to perform all thirty-two in a single concert cycle from memory. Camille Saint-Saëns offered to play any one of the thirty-two from memory as an encore in his public recital debut at the age of ten. Artur Schnabel was the first since von Bülow to play them all from memory in a single concert cycle and was the first to make a complete recording of the monumental collection in 1927. Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas have served as a barometer of musical and scholarly achievement in the piano world since their creation between 1795 and 1822, and continue to fascinate and captivate both musical intellectuals and dilettantes.

Tuesday morning’s Competition Conversation, the fourth CIPC “Festival Event” held in the Recital Hall at The Cleveland Museum of Art was entitled “The Art of Performing Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas”. Featured speaker Peter Takács, Professor of Piano at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, knows his subject intimately as he conquered the mountain as well, having recorded the entire cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas on the CAMBRIA label. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Round Two, Session Six (August 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC-ButterflyThe final four contestants rolled around for a second hearing on Monday evening, beginning with a clever program devised and played by Cahill Smith, who followed a beautifully shaped reading of Scarlatti’s K. 466 sonata — in which he pointed up important harmonic details — with Sebastian Currier’s 1996 Scarlatti Cadences, a series of dreamy riffs on snippets of the composer’s works. The competition’s ‘first sighting of Chopin’s Winter Wind etude (op. 25/11) was well organized in Smith’s hands but perhaps not as wild as the composer had in mind. The left-hand themes rang out handsomely. In Brahms’s Vier Klavierstücke, op. 11, Smith created stylistically true performances on a Brahmsian scale that would in some cases have benefited from longer melodic lines. One tiny glitch and one more noticeable memory flub were minor blemishes on the surface of a satisfying set. [Read more…]

Review: Cleveland International Piano Competition — Round Two, Session Five (August 5)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC-ButterflyStanislav Khristenko displayed his gentle and expressive side at the opening of Monday afternoon’s session with elegant, characterful playing in Beethoven’s op. 2 sonata. Light, moody and colorful, the sonata was a delight — delicate in the scherzo, impetuous yet graceful in the rondo. His reading of Chopin’s “Torrent” etude (Op. 10/4) was nicely layered; he tossed its ending off with a dismissive musical nod. He ended his set with Montsalvatge’s witty Sonatina para Yvette from 1962, playing the opening toccata moodily, creating an eloquent “beauty and the beast” dialogue in the second movement, and stylishly molding its finale, another toccata, scampery this time, out of which twinkled the surprise of a well-known nursery rhyme (Mozart knew it by its French title). [Read more…]

Report: Cleveland International Piano Competition Conversation — Jury Roundtable (August 5)

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by Guytano Parks

Jury-Roundtable“Technical prowess is assumed and expected, but it is not enough by itself,” said HaeSun Paik of Korea, 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition jury member, regarding competition success at Monday morning’s Jury Roundtable, the third “Festival Event” at The Cleveland Museum of Art. This sentiment was echoed unanimously by all the other jurors: Nelita True, USA; Frank Weinstock, USA; Daejin Kim, Korea; Elinar Steen-Nokleberg, Jury Chairman, Norway; Robert Plano, Italy; Andrzej Jasinski, Poland and Alexander Korsantia, Georgia.

CIPC Executive Director Pierre van der Westhuitzen moderated the discussion which touched on key issues such as what the jurors listen for during performances and how music competitions impact careers. The Roundtable also included refreshing humor as HaeSun Paik led off the provocative conversation with a candid recounting of some of her own experiences as both competitor and juror in several major piano competitions. “You need huge luck to win,” she said of one of the competitions in which she competed, adding, “with 200 competitors, the jury was surely bound to have difficulties remembering you, let alone staying awake!” [Read more…]

Eight advance to semifinals in the Cleveland International Piano Competition

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CIPC-ButterflyCleveland — August 5

The following eight contestants will play in the semifinal rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday:

Tuesday at 1:00 pm and 7:00 pm

Ruoyu Huang
Jin Uk Kim
•           •           •
Jiayan Sun
Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev

Wednesday at 1:00 pm and 7:00 pm

Annika Treutler
Oskar Jezior
•           •           •
Stanislav Khristenko
François Dumont

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