It is the end of an era at Leeds. The 18th Leeds international piano competition, which came to a close on Saturday night, was the last to be chaired by Fanny Waterman, who conceived the event in the 1960s and has been its chair and artistic director ever since. It was also only the second time a woman, 25-year-old Anna Tcybuleva, has taken the top prize. South Korea’s Heejae Kim, 28, placed second and Russia’s Vitaly Pisarenko, 28, was third.
Of course, the judges’ decisions were not just based on the performances of the concertos the finalists play with the Hallé Orchestra and Mark Elder in the last two concerts; the judges also took account of their recitals in previous rounds. Tcybuleva’s success certainly raised a few eyebrows after her performance of Brahms’s B flat Concerto – the last of the six concertos we heard – in which, for all the fluency of her playing, she often seemed incapable of seeing the overall shape of the work, and her role in projecting it, rather than the detail of each passing moment.
If the audience had had its way, I suspect, the genial, engaging Kim would have walked away with the top prize, for her account of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. She was utterly absorbed in the music in every bar. As it is, Kim took the Terence Judd-Hallé prize, which in addition to her second-place prize at the competition guarantees her more concerto appearances with the Hallé orchestra. To judge from Pisarenko’s facelessly efficient account of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto, however, the third-place performer is another pianist with steely technique and limited musical imagination in the current Russian mould.
Three of the six finalists played Rachmaninov, but only one brought anything fresh or arresting to these overfamiliar works. That was 21-year-old American Drew Petersen, who – inexplicably as far as I’m concerned – only placed fourth; his account of Rachmaninov’s First Concerto was the best of the six performances in the final by some distance, and he perfectly captured the music’s youthful ebullience and glitter. In fact, only Petersen and Kim gave any sense that they chose music they genuinely loved.
- The concerto finals are on BBC4 from 18 September. This review was amended on 14 September to note that Sofya Gulyak was the first woman to win the competition, in 2009.
