If one thing is certain in today’s uncertain times, it is that the piano world thrives more than ever. Think of all the local Chopin competitions this past year, not to mention the big one coming to Warsaw in October. The 2025 Queen Elisabeth Competition is in the final stages as we speak. And among hundreds of free concerts taking place this weekend in Milan’s annual Piano City festival will be a two-day marathon encompassing Shostakovich’s complete symphonies in piano duet transcriptions (I’m playing No 9 with Chantal Balestri on Sunday, by the way!). However, for the next three weeks, pride of place centers upon Fort Worth, Texas, and the 17th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The Preliminary and Quarterfinal rounds take place in the New Texas Christian University Music Center’s Van Cliburn Concert Hall. The venue contains slightly more than 700 seats that wrap fully around the hall, with a similar acoustic design to larger venues. Like many modern-day concert halls, its sonic environment can be fine tuned to varying degrees of reverberation and ambience.

Two nights ago the names of the 28 competitors were drawn to determine their playing order in the Preliminaries. Everyone has theories about running orders. Some feel that a candidate makes a stronger impression playing first than last, because the ears are fresher at the start, yet grow more fatigued as the day unfolds, notwithstanding a good number of breaks. On the other hand, with the availability of each round on YouTube, one can listen in one’s own time, or perhaps hear a performance again to listen out for particular details. Bear in mind, though, that the close and analytic audio image in the YouTube transmission apparently differs from the resonant ambience mentioned by a fellow journalist reporting live from the venue. Please keep that in mind while reading my blog entries, since I’m covering the Cliburn via YouTube from Italy until June 1, and live from Fort Worth from June 3. Due to the seven-hour time-zone difference, my YouTube reportage may lag behind very slightly, but I promise not to miss a thing!

Let me disclose that I’ve heard several of the 28 candidates, either when judging recent competitions or having taught them in master classes. Such is the case with Xuanxiang Wu, a Chinese pianist now studying in New York. Last year while adjudicating and teaching at the 2024 Chicago International Music Competition and Festival, we worked intensively on Chopin’s Second Ballade. I was impressed by his immense capabilities, warm sound and natural musicality. As it happens, this youngest of all the contenders was chosen to open the festivities.

Candidates can play what they wish in their solo rounds, yet all are required to include The Cliburn’s newly commissioned work, Gabriela Montero’s Rachtime, with which Wu opened his set. My initial impression of the piece was that of a clever improvisation in the style of Rachmaninov, with more padding than substance. Still, Wu gave both an exciting and well-groomed performance, varying the textures with nice left-hand accentuations. For all his clean articulation in Beethoven’s Op 78 Sonata, some of the rapid passages tended to rush ahead, as if the Sonata was playing Wu rather than the other way around. One noticed this in some of the sweeping runs and double note sequences in an otherwise bracing Liszt Don Juan Fantasy. Perhaps Wu seemed most grounded in Brahms’ B flat minor Intermezzo, Op 118 No 2, where his sonority opened up to singing effect.

Watch Xuanxiang Wu's performance:

Another pianist from China, the 27-year-old Shangru Du, performed next. He displayed poise and experience in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, with a suave ‘Ondine’ and a fluid ‘Le gibet’ featuring fine control of the tolling repeated B flats and billowy processional chords. Du began ‘Scarbo’ at an optimistic clip, but gradually adjusted to where he could treat the flickering runs and rapid-fire chords as music rather than athletics. His Bartók Three Études, Op 18, made up in staggering accuracy for what they lacked in colour and tonal heft. The performance concluded with a clean but less involving and rather foursquare performance of Rachtime, performed from the score.

Shangru Du:

25-year-old Xiaofu Ju (also from China) concluded the first of today’s three Preliminary Round recitals. He had me at the very first bars of his opening salvo, Janáček’s Sonata ‘1.X.1905’. Aside from harsh tone in loud moments (is this on account of the livestream audio or the pianist?), Ju totally taps into this composer’s speech-like syntax and very personal sound world, yet is not afraid to build the climaxes with full virtuoso force. He also took Rachtime at a slower tempo, allowing for much more variation in nuance, detail, dynamics and expression, and while building the textures from the bottom up. Indeed, Rachtime sounded almost Brahmsian in Ju’s hands, like a completely different piece.

Similarly, Ju’s Gaspard de la nuit couldn’t have contrasted more from Shangru Du’s. Next to the classicism of Du’s ‘Ondine’, Ju strove more for effect as he toyed with balances, yet gave his all in the climatic two-handed arpeggiated figures. He began ‘Le gibet’ with moody deliberation, gradually working his way up to a faster basic tempo. In ‘Scarbo’, Ju took great risks; he hovered over the bass register rumbles, stretched out the mysterious quiet moments, and brought out the bass lines underneath the ascending right hand seconds. Such volatile music-making focused more on local details than the big picture. As such, Ju’s ‘Scarbo’ may not have been for all tastes (I’m curious how the jury members reacted), yet it certainly beckoned my attention.

Xiaofu Ju:

The second Preliminary Round recital began with Ryota Yamazaki, a 26-year-old pianist from Japan whom I first heard in 2023 when he won third prize at the International Busoni Competition. He started the Bach/Busoni chorale prelude ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ strong, but his overloaded crescendos built up to no consequence. The clarity and definition he brought to his voice leading throughout Mozart’s D major Sonata, K576, was undermined by fussy, micromanaged phrasings in the first two movements that drew attention away from the music’s natural flow and grace. Fortunately he got out of his own way in the Finale (for the most part), although I fear that several tiny slips will cost him brownie points from the jury. Playing with the score, Yamazaki gave a capable yet unvaried and under-characterised reading of Rachtime compared to Xiaofu Ju’s far more interesting traversal earlier in the day. The main elements missing from Yamazaki’s Liszt Norma Fantasy was fantasy itself and a genuine operatic sensibility. Yet one cannot deny the studious preparation and technical confidence that the pianist brought to this dauntingly difficult work. In fairness, a professional pianist colleague in the audience whose opinions I value waxed enthusiastically over the performance, so perhaps I need to hear it again.

Ryota Yamazaki:

Having been eliminated in the 2022 Cliburn Quarterfinals, the Milanese pianist Federico Gad Crema returns in 2025 for another try. As in 2022, he opened his Preliminary round concert with Scarlatti. His approach to the composer is stylistically aware yet unabashedly pianistic, and if that was good enough for Maria Tipo, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Mikhail Pletnev, then more power to Mr Crema. He warmed up with a relaxing A major Sonata, Kk208, then served up beautifully pointed double notes and runs in the G major, Kk146. His Chopin Polonaise-fantasie has gained colour and dimension since I heard him perform it during the 2021 Warsaw Chopin Competition. At the same time, he plays straighter and more directly, making expressive points primarily through accent, tonal shading and dynamic scaling. But he doesn’t reach the emotional temperature and sense of exultation that I heard in a recent performance by Korean pianist Jeyu Lee (another sensational young talent trotting the competition boards). By contrast, in Debussy’s Images Book I, Crema’s ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ was less about reflection than navel gazing and dissipating the long lines. But ‘Hommage à Rameau’ better absorbed Crema’s phrase tapering, while ‘Mouvement’ benefitted from a stronger left-hand presence than commonly heard, and a convincingly skittish point of view. Although playing from score, Crema’s Rachtime sounded thoroughly internalised, suffused with qualities of lyrical expansiveness and warmth that I hadn’t heard from earlier candidates.

Federico Gad Crema:

Keeping up with Canadian/American pianist Carter Johnson’s successes on the competition circuit amounts to a full-time job. I’ve always been taken by his sincere, communicative and intelligent musicianship, as well as his knack for creating stimulating programs, and he didn’t disappoint. His incisive, freshly minted Bach Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother evoked the fibre and sinew of prime Rudolf Serkin, in contrast to Crema’s Shura Cherkassky-esque lavender and pastels. It took Johnson’s performance of Rachtime to reveal a melodic core that had eluded me in earlier readings, and perhaps that has something to do with this pianist’s experience as a vocal coach. Johnson’s sonority took on a dulcet, jewel-like patina over the course of his drop-dead gorgeous Clementi Sonata in F sharp minor, Op 25 No 5, followed by a truly stimulating and imaginatively projected Prokofiev group featuring three of the Visions fugitives, Op 22 (Nos 17, 14 and 16), an appropriately sardonic Suggestion diabolique, Op 4 No 4, and the best interpretation I’ve ever heard of the crazy Scherzo, Op 52 No 6. Whether or not Johnson proceeds to the Quaterfinals, his Preliminary set is a keeper.

Carter Johnson:

24-year-old Georgian pianist David Khrikuli’s opening Scriabin group got off to a bangy start in the 10th and 14th Preludes from Op 11, but he quickly compensated with the smoldering sexiness of Guirlandes, Op 73 No 1, followed by a Scriabin Seventh Sonata that oozed necromanticism in every bar. In Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, I preferred the sec terseness of Khrikuli’s faster sections to overly languorous playing elsewhere. He effortlessly sailed through Rachtime, replete with thoughtfully contoured inner voices and especially strong left-hand maneuvering. Few pianists taking on Vladimir Horowitz’s transcriptions can make these very personal pieces their own without imitating the master. Volodos is an exception, and so is David Khrikuli, at least in the Liszt/Horowitz Hungarian Rhapsody No 15, where he revelled in the dissonances and brought more roundness to the scurrying runs than in the master’s gaunter recording.

David Khrikuli:

Back in 2021 I was slightly disappointed when Aristo Sham didn’t make it to the Warsaw Chopin Competition’s Semi-finals. So I was happy to learn that this charismatic pianist would be present in Fort Worth. He’s become more serious-minded over time, as his fiercely unified Bach/Busoni Chaconne revealed, with not one ounce of fat on its bones. Next, Sham delivered the best performance of Rachtime from this long day; he brought out and gave shape to almost all of the counter-lines and hidden melodies, while astutely apportioning rubatos, tenutos and ceasuras. Likewise, his ‘Ondine’ from Gaspard de la nuit was better controlled in comparison to the two earlier performers. ‘Le gibet’ proved steadier though cooler than Xiaofu Ju’s. Then the speed demon I remembered from Warsaw returned with a vengeance, as ‘Scarbo’ shot from the starting gate like a bucking bronco.

Aristo Sham:

The 22-year-old Angel Stanislav Wang first came to my attention as winner of the 63rd Jaén Prize International Piano Competition in 2022. His forthright and rather colourless opening selection (Beethoven’s Fantasia, Op 77) frankly didn’t turn me on. Ditto his sincere yet sectionalised reading of Rachtime, and a crisply delineated yet callow and one-dimensional Liszt Don Juan Fantasy. However, he presented a heartfelt and beautifully timed Liszt ‘Les cloches de Genève’.

Angel Stanislav Wang:

Lastly, the Russian Philipp Lynov brought day one to a close with a set that commenced with a well-played if overly loud and notey Bach Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother (no match for Carter Johnson’s earlier and more stylish performance). Lynov brought neo-Lisztian power and sweep to Rachtime: not subtle but admittedly exciting. His Barber Sonata generated equal thrills and more gratifying musical results, from the Scherzo’s playful inflections to the Passacaglia’s dark sustaining power and a high-octane Fugue where Lynov’s paradoxical fusion of inexorable drive and grandeur clearly rocked the room.

Philipp Lynov:

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