At the end of a puzzle for the jury chaired by Zarin Mehta, 10 semi-finalists of the Concours musical international de Montréal (CMIM) were designated Tuesday evening. Two Canadians remain in the running: British Columbians Carter Johnson and Jaeden Izik-Dzurko.
Friday evening, for the first time, the semi-final of a “piano edition” of the CMIM will begin with a chamber music test, the competitors having to interpret, with the first chairs of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, a among five movements of a Piano quartet by Beethoven, Brahms, Fauré, Mozart or Schumann. This “small” event will certainly weigh heavily in the balance, before the solo semi-finals on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.
Four Canadians participated in “Piano 2024”, and the value of the two pianists not selected says everything about the level of the competition. JJ Jun Li Bui won the sixth prize in the Chopin Competition in 2021, won that year by Bruce Liu; t at 17, he was the youngest competitor. He studies with Dang Thai Son, Bruce Liu’s teacher, in fact. Elisabeth Pion, well known here, has given several recitals and concerts in Montreal, including the Piano concerto by Hélène de Montgeroult with Arion, recorded for ATMA.
The two artists remaining in the running are Carter Johnson and Jaeden Izik-Dzurko. It’s not so surprising: Carter Johnson, now 27, was the 2018 winner of the OSM Competition and the Canadian Music Competition; and we have already written here all our admiration for Jaeden Izik-Dzurko, first prize in the Maria Canals Competition, second in the 2022 OSM Competition, now a student of Jacob Leuschner in Detmold and Benedetto Lupo in Rome. His first round recital was splendid.
A mutation
The eight other competitors who will compete for the laurels are Elias Ackerley, a very impressive 22-year-old Englishman, who divides his life between the United Kingdom and Korea; the Italian Michelle Candotti, who will celebrate her 28th birthday the day after the final; Antonio Chen Guang, a 29-year-old Chinese, runner-up to Izik-Dzurko at Maria Canals 2022; the Japanese Arisa Onoda, 28, who “has participated in more than a dozen major international competitions” since 2014; New Yorker Anthony Ratinov, 26; the Italian Gabriele Strata, 25 years old; and Derek Wang from the United States, almost 26 years old, who attacked his competition with the Fantasy K. 475 by Mozart.
Four of these nine candidates are — or were — students at Yale University. Boris Berman, Dang Thai Son, Benedetto Lupo, Boris Slutsky, Ronan O’Hara are names of professors that come up in several CVs.
We have saved the name of Jakub Kuszlik for the end, an old acquaintance who followed the Chopin Competition in 2021. He won fourth prize and the Mazurka Prize. Kuszlik, who was the favorite pianist of the “up-and-coming jury” made up of nine students in advanced piano studies from the three Montreal institutions supervised by Janelle Fung (we understand them: he was freewheeling in an exceptional 3rd Sonata by Chopin, but proved nothing in Debussy), illustrates, in itself, the change exposed by Chantal Poulin, new director of the CMIM, in our interview published on Saturday: “Before, they were young up-and-comers; now we are talking about artists of the new generation. »
Imagining a winner of the Chopin Competition (a “non-category” competition, if ever there was one) coming to compete three years later in Montreal was previously totally inconceivable. And there are two of them in this case.
This tells us things. Either on the backlash of the pandemic for the winners at the beginning of this decade, or on a saturation of the musical world, or on the purpose of the competitions, which, removed from their function of revealer or catalyst, would become a parallel international circuit remunerative for deserving young artists.