FORT WORTH — The 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition reached its final round the week of June 3-7. Performances are scheduled Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday evenings and Saturday afternoon at Bass Performance Hall.
Each of six finalists is performing two piano concertos with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, led by guest conductor Marin Alsop. Three concertos are scheduled for each day, with a 20-minute intermission between the second and third. We will be updating performance reviews each day.
Three medalists and winners of other awards will be announced at a 7 p.m. ceremony Saturday. Total value of prizes including cash and concert management is estimated around $2 million.
This final round is a heroic challenge for the FWSO, an excellent orchestra these days but shown in the worst possible light with the Cliburn schedule. In the course of the final week it’s having to rehearse and perform 10 different piano concertos, by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Ravel and Bartók.
That’s after the previous week’s semifinal round, when the orchestra collaborated on seven different Mozart piano concertos with the 12 semifinalists. It’s hard to imagine any other orchestra performing under such demands.
One of the world’s highest-visibility classical music competitions, held quadrennially in Fort Worth, the Cliburn is open to pianists 18 to 30. This year’s competition, the 17th, drew 340 applicants. Thirty pianists were selected in advance screenings to come to Fort Worth for the contest, although two withdrew beforehand. In the first three rounds, a jury of distinguished pianists, chaired by Paul Lewis, narrowed the 28 to 18, then 12, then six.
The first two rounds comprised only solo recitals, the semifinal round a solo recital in addition to a Mozart piano concerto.
For complete schedules, check the Cliburn website: cliburn.org.
Tickets for all competition performances are available at 817-212-4280 or cliburn.org. In addition, free video streams are available live and on demand at cliburn.org and the Cliburn’s YouTube channel. Video presentations are hosted by Buddy Bray and Elizabeth Joy Roe, with commentary and behind-the-scenes interviews.
Tuesday evening, June 3
Aristo Sham, Hong Kong, China, 29. The Final Round started with great promise, with a lively, personable performance of the Mendelssohn G minor Concerto (No. 1). Lighter-textured concertos like this tend to be done with smaller orchestras these days, but a pretty full complement of the FWSO was onstage for all three of the first evening’s performances.
In the 2022 Cliburn, for reasons unknown, Alsop kept shushing the orchestra, yielding strangely muffled performances. This time she let it play out at appropriate levels, and she did a good job of coordinating with the pianists’ conceptions — for better and for worse. Occasionally fuzzy attacks from the orchestra were understandable under the circumstances.
Sham seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, vividly characterizing music both stormy and tender. Music louder and softer was tellingly tapered, the piano always fitting just so in roles alternately soloistic and texture-filling. Rubato was aptly balanced between expressive lingering and pressing ahead.
Angel Stanislav Wang, United States, 22. Wang’s account of the Beethoven Fourth Concerto started at a surprisingly relaxed pace, and the first movement never achieved essential urgency. Longstanding evidence suggests the slow movement — marked Andante con moto — should move quite a bit more than this. At least the finale got energized. In general, Wang’s performance seemed more prosaic than poetic, without enough energy or dynamic subtlety — and not always secure.
Evren Ozel, United States, 26. At least to me, the opening of Ozel’s Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto felt just deliberate enough never to take off — more andante than the marked allegro moderato. He kept slowing even more for piano solos.
A pianist friend watching the livestream at home said balances there of piano and orchestra sounded fine, but in the hall Ozel too often kept too much in the spotlight when the orchestra had the melodies.
The strings’ big opening tune was barely audible under the piano’s beefy punctuations (marked merely forte), and cello and oboe solos were similarly muffled early in the slow movement. Ozel is an accomplished pianist: I liked much in his semifinal round recital, and what I heard of his Mozart Concerto No. 25 on the livestream was elegant. But for me his Tchaikovsky seemed a kit of pieces that never quite came together.
