There should have been six medals in Forth Worth, Texas. But there could be only three, one each of gold, silver and bronze, as the Seventeenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition came to a hard-fought conclusion Saturday in the Bass Performance Hall.
Gold went to Aristo Sham, 29, a personable and articulate Hong Kong native with a penchant for serious repertoire and distinctive wardrobe. He complemented a brilliant Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 on Tuesday with a note-perfect account on Friday of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. It says something about his assurance on stage that he won the $2,500 USD audience award (culled from an online voter pool of more than 9,000) as well as the gold medal, which is worth $100,000 USD in cash alone.
A bracing performance of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata in the quarterfinal round surely helped propel him to victory. At a post-announcement press conference, Sham admitted to a fondness for “constructed” music while deflecting the suggestion that German repertoire was a special interest. After all, he pointed out, his semifinal round was all-Russian.
The silver medallist (US$50,000) was Vitaly Starikov, 30, a thoughtful resident of New Haven, Connecticut and graduate of the Moscow Conservatory who holds Russian and Israeli passports. His remarkable exploit was to match the ferociously difficult Piano Concerto No. 2 of Bartók with Schumann’s inward-looking Piano Concerto.
Taking the bronze (US$25,000) was the soft-spoken American Evren Ozel, 26, whose compare-and-contrast pairing was of Tchaikovsky’s grandiose Piano Concerto No. 1 and Beethoven’s poetic Piano Concerto No. 4. Few would deny that his refined style was better suited to the latter.
To The Final Final Round
Each of the finalists was required to play twice with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop. The 28-year-old Canadian Carter Johnson (in fact a dual Canada-U.S. citizen) received $10,000 USD as a non-medal-winning finalist, as did the Moscow Conservatory-trained American Angel Stanislav Wang, 22, and another Moscow alum, Philipp Lynov, 26.
Canada was also represented in the Awards Ceremony by Alice Burla, 28, who won a $4,000 USD jury discretionary award, along with the 26-year-old German, Jonas Aumiller, and Mikhail Kambarov, 24, of Russia. Burla, eliminated in the quarterfinals, was the lone woman to win a prize.
It has not gone unnoticed that only four of the 28 competitors who started the Cliburn process back on May 21 were female. Jacques Marquis, the Canadian president and CEO of the Texas competition, asks us to remember that five of the nine pianists comprising the jury were women.
Other notable prizewinners included Yangrui Cai, 24, of China, who earned $5,000 USD for the best performance of Rachtime, the mandatory work composed by jury member (and one-time Montrealer) Gabriela Montero. This is a significant victory considering that all the competitors had to play it. Ozel won an extra $5,000 USD for best performance of a Mozart concerto. He probably helped his chances by writing his own cadenzas.
“No safety net, no crazy virtuosity, very clear instrumentation, no place to hide, all about voicing, phrasing and the music,” Marquis said of the semifinal Mozart round, which replaced the chamber-music round in 2022. “That’s why we decided to make it mandatory for everyone.” Carlos Miguel Prieto was the conductor.
The last of four final sessions, on Saturday, seemed to seal a medal finish for Lynov, who gave an authoritative performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. A subdued opening left plenty of runway for this serious-minded Russian to reach a monumental climax in the first-movement cadenza. Semiquavers galloped in the madcap second movement and the glissandi of the third were exact. Moonlight in the finale offered respite from all the turbulence. Lynov was in a sombre mood at a post-finals party in the central Fort Worth public space known as Sundance Square. When asked whether his competition career would continue, he said, “Unfortunately, yes.”
Johnson chose Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand as his second offering, producing a more coherent sonority with one hand than he had Wednesday (in Prokofiev) with two. Everything went well for this natural communicator, a boyish-looking father of two.
“I don’t know much Ravel,” a member of the audience was overheard to say at intermission. “I know the Bolero. But I want to hear this again.”
Having performed Bartók 2 and lived to tell the tale, Starikov turned to Schumann. An array of tempo changes (carefully followed by Alsop) brought you into the composer’s inner orbit, perhaps without giving you enough reasons to stay. The sequence with the cellos in the Intermezzo was on the slow side. But Starikov’s approach was certainly personal.
“Schumann is very special to me,” he said at a meet-the-press gathering on Tuesday. “It doesn’t seem like such a technically demanding piece, but this makes is more difficult. You cannot just play the notes.”
Friday featured a trio of performances differing in kind but united by high accomplishment. Ozel’s lyrical approach, which had bordered on nonchalance in Tchaikovsky, was well adapted to the Beethoven. The outer movements were songful and the adversarial rhetoric of the Andante con moto was nicely captured. Interesting that the otherwise well-behaved audience could not resist the temptation to applaud the first movement.
Next came Wang in Rachmaninoff’s arch-familiar Piano Concerto No. 3. A brown belt in Tae Kwon Do who has studied ballet, this pianist projected the music boldly but never at the expense of dreamy romance. Figuration was admirably clear and rubato sounded natural. Wang was told by his grandfather (on the maternal Russian side) that “Rach 3” represented “the true sound of the Russian soul.” He obviously took the comment to heart.
Too Clean Cut?
Sham closed the Friday concert with Brahms. A few online commentators have censured the performance as too clean cut but it is hard to find fault with the faultless. Educated in the U.K. and at Harvard, where he majored in economics, this pianist combines impeccable technique with a relaxed personal style.
He might be good medicine for troubled times.
“At the end of second movement,” Sham said of the Mendelssohn, “there is this overwhelming feeling that no matter what happens in the world, everything will be OK.” One can always hope.
No international competition would be complete without disputes over the results. For some listeners the early elimination of Magdalene Ho, a Malaysian, was not a good thing. The Montreal pianist Dominique Morel, in Fort Worth to assess prospects, regretted the disappearance of Cai.
Without having followed every round exhaustively, I harbour a fondness for Aumiller, who in the semifinals played his own transcription of Liszt’s tone poem Les Préludes — a tribute both to his bravado and the Cliburn policy of allowing wide latitude in programming. Liszt would have loved it.
If there had been an award for sartorial creativity it would probably have gone to Sham, who wore a light blue suit and checkered socks for Mendelssohn and a tuxedo jacket and dark red socks for Brahms. “It’s part of my artistic persona,” the pianist says.
“Aristo” is pronounced ar-ISS-toe, although the pianist also answers to ar-EES-toe and AR-iss-toe.
“The story behind the origin of my name is actually quite boring,” he said. “My mother found it in a book of baby names.
“It is Greek for ‘best.’”
- You can find more information about the winners [HERE]. All rounds are available to watch on the Van Cliburn YouTube channel.
Are you looking to promote an event? Have a news tip? Need to know the best events happening this weekend? Send us a note.
#LUDWIGVAN
Get the daily arts news straight to your inbox.
Sign up for the Ludwig Van Toronto e-Blast! — local classical music and opera news straight to your inbox HERE.
- THE SCOOP | The 17th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition: Results - June 9, 2025
- FEATURE | Russian Pianists In Charge As The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Reaches Finals - June 5, 2025
- THE SCOOP | Report From The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition: Repertoire - June 3, 2025
