Turning a globe to a spot roughly equidistant between London and Beijing, with Moscow due north, one lands upon the United Arab Emirates, where the third edition of the Classic Piano International Competition has just been held. Its position makes it an ideal location to welcome musicians from around the whole world. A British protectorate until 1971, since independence the UAE’s seven emirates have invested heavily in education and development. The country’s largest city Dubai has become a popular tourist resort on the shores of the Persian Gulf, with a diversity of architectural aesthetics emerging from what was a desert only forty years ago. Dubai has recently attempted to conquer the sky by erecting the world’s tallest skyscraper (830 metres), and even ventured into the sea, by building a palm-shaped peninsula of reclaimed land.
It was in the Zabeel Theatre, built on this giant offshore palm frond, that Classic Piano 2024 decided to hold its contest rounds. (The first edition of the competition was held not in Dubai, but in Malta.) But if you think the contest has been parachuted into a place with no connection whatsoever with music, think again: the Competition’s discreet artistic director organised a carefully curated festival to run alongside the rounds themselves. From 1st to 15th February, the Berlin Symphony and Oxford Philharmonic Orchestras made appearances, along with many soloists, including violinists James Ehnes and Maxim Vengerov, pianists Fazıl Say, Cyprien Katsaris and Ashley Wass, among others.
The latter was also a member of the competition’s jury – comprising a mix of pianists, conductors, agents and concert promoters. In addition to Wass, the roster of pianists on the jury included no lesser names than Peter Donohoe, Pavel Gililov, François-Frédéric Guy, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Hüseyin Sermet. Some teach privately or in institutional settings, but all of them have real careers as concert musicians.
The jury also included two people, Kirsten Dawes and Eleanor Hope, able to offer the competition’s laureates a plethora of performance opportunities, the former working in Berlin at the Pierre Boulez Saal, the latter in Vienna where she runs a management agency. This side of things is worthy of mention: in a world where competitions can often blur together, the depth of this competition’s jury is a notable exception. A good competition starts with a good jury. And a good jury rewards talent that is ready for a career – not merely the ability acquired by the end of a student’s training. The distinction between these two conditions is not always easy to detect.
70 candidates had made their way through the preliminary tests organised over a period of two years in several major cities in Europe, America and Asia. Of these, 43 candidates arrived in Dubai for the first round of the competition proper. The youngest was 14, while the oldest was on the eve of his 37th birthday (of a sufficient age to be the youngest’s father). They came from all over the world: China, South Korea, Japan, Georgia, New Zealand, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Ukraine, Turkey, Belarus, Italy, Israel, the United States, Armenia, and Russia, with some Russians adding the name of their country of residence to that of their country of origin. (This arduous process is soon to begin again for the Classic Violin Olympus Competition, to be held in 2025.)
The final two rounds were filmed and broadcast live on the internet by medici.tv, which is heavily involved in the broadcasting of music competitions. Such events are now held under the scrutiny of a worldwide audience which is distant but no less passionate. The atmosphere in the hall itself was somewhat strange: while the theatre was open to the public, few people decided to show up. Most of the performances were held in front of the jury and the fifteen or so journalists who had also come from all over the world. This can be seen as a flaw: there was no general audience there to support the candidates as they would be normally supported at a concert. But it can also be considered an advantage: there was no audience to lend proceedings an air of hysteria, loudly expressing their favoured choices (as can happen in some other long-established international competitions).
The 43 first-round candidates were whittled down to 9 to face off in the final, which lasted three long afternoons. Rather too many for me to name check every contestant, but I will talk about three who made a particular impression on me during the final – none of whom, except one, were previously known to me. I’m pleased to be able to agree with juror Hüseyin Sermet, who said to me after the awards were announced, “I don’t think we’ve made any blunders here!” Had it been me judging, I would have switched just two places. But there was no arguing with the award of the first prize to Andrey Gugnin (Russia-Netherlands, aged 36), a magnificent pianist and accomplished musician who already has a fine career behind him and has won prizes in prestigious competitions, including the Sydney Competition in 2016.
Gugnin is already known in Britain thanks to some notable recordings released by Hyperion, and also in France from having played at La Grange de Meslay and elsewhere. So why did he enter Classic Piano 2024? Like many Russians, Gugnin publicly announced his opposition to the invasion of Ukraine and has left everything behind him, not least a substantial bloc of concert engagements in Russia, arriving in the Netherlands where he is now living on modest means. Not only has this competition brought him a substantial sum of prize money, but also a very well remunerated tour: the value of his win will be around €150,000. He was able to take part because the rules permitted it – at this stage of his career, he was taking a big risk.
In any case, he gave a deeply cultured Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto, with pianistic authority coupled to a deft control of sound, including a first movement delivered in exemplary fashion, and a finale Alla breve that spared us the over-emphasis all too often heard at the end. But perhaps above all, a second movement sung with a depth of sound and musical dignity rarely heard – qualities not untypical of the Moscow students of the late Vera Gornostaïeva, Gugnin’s teacher.
The Armenian State Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Sergey Smbatyan accompanied him well, which was not the case for all the finalists, so exhausted were the orchestra by a marathon that required them to perform over 40 pieces in just a few days (the semi-final was also with the orchestra!). The programme for the semi-final was compulsory: a concertante piece by Alexey Shor, the competition’s composer-in-residence, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20, KV466.
Another candidate worth mentioning is Zhiquan Wang (China, aged 14), who played Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 3 with seriousness, ease, without showmanship, in harmony with the orchestra and not all alone like a drum major, and without any lapse of concentration, as if he had already played this difficult piece on many occasions. For sure, his mastery of sound and the freedom to speak more eloquently is perhaps yet to fully develop, but he certainly deserved his Fifth Prize, without a shadow of doubt.
In the same concerto, Arina Antonosyan (Armenia, aged 21) was magisterial. She played with a sound that was radiant, never harsh or flashy, with eloquence and natural authority, giving flight to an exhausted orchestra who could often be lacking with other less inspiring candidates. She won the Fourth Prize when she would have justly deserved the Second.
Laureates of Classic Piano International Competition 2024
First Prize: Andrey Gugnin
Second Prize: Sunah Kim
Third Prize: Anastasiia Kliuchereva
Fourth Prize: Arina Antonosyan
Fifth Prize: Zhiquan Wang
Sixth Prize: Marek Kozák
Seventh Prize: Yanfan Yang
Eighth Prize: Artem Kuznetsov
Ninth Prize: Hyounglok Choi
View the complete results, including special prizes.
This article was sponsored by the Classical Music Development Initiative.
Translated from French by David Karlin.
