SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION 2025: GRAND FINAL / Review

 

SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL 

PIANO COMPETITION 2025 

GRAND FINAL 

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall 

Sunday (19 January 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 January 2025 with the title "Singapore International Piano Competition levels up with stellar global competitors".

It is a strange but true fact that there has not been a major international piano competition in Singapore since the Rolex International Piano Competition in 1989. The Singapore International Piano Competition, now in its fifth edition, has been operating under the radar for the past few years, organised by the China-based Global International Musicians Association (GIMA) which has otherwise no imprint here. 

Jury members included
Xiaohan Wang (Artistic Director), Danwen Wei,
Adam Gatehouse, Piers Lane, Gesa Luecker,
Noriko Ogawa, Katarzyna Popova-Zydron
& Albert Tiu.

The competition, however, took a massive leap this year by attracting an international cast of young pianists, judged over multiple rounds by an august international jury (comprising well-known concert pianists and pedagogues) and culminating in a final concerto round with a full symphony orchestra. Judging by the playing in earlier rounds, the standard has never been higher, with 20 pianists from ten Asian and European nations whittled down to just three for the final showdown. 

The Metropolitan Festival Orchestra conducted by Chan Tze Law did the accompanying and the final outcome was nothing less than satisfactory. For someone as young as Leyu Xu from China, at 16 and the most junior competitor, it must have been a daunting task. 

Her nerves mostly served her well in Sergei Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, where she matched the orchestra blow-for-blow. Overcoming the most technically difficult variations with relative ease, the chordal climax of the famous 18th Variation became the glorious pinnacle of her performance. Momentary desynchronisations with the orchestra near the final hurdle threatened to derail the proceedings but she held up well to the end. 

Quite unusually, there were two performances of Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto in G minor (Op.16). This is regularly essayed in high level piano competitions but not often heard in concert because of its ferocious technical demands. That competition warhorses, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s First and Rachmaninov’s Second and Third Concertos, had been expunged from the prescribed repertoire might have also explained this anomaly. 

Already a seasoned soloist, 26-year-old Russian Philipp Lynov provided the requisite Slavic brooding for the opening slow movement. The gigantic cadenza which entered most surreptitiously was gradually built up with ever-escalating intensity to its monstrous climax of sweeping arpeggios and crashing chords. 

The machine-gun rattling in the Scherzo and myriad grotesqueries of the Intermezzo were very well negotiated before the finale’s tempestuous onslaught of percussive violence. 

This would have been the winning performance if not for 20-year-old Tianyou Li from China replicating the same heroics but in a more nuanced reading which better contrasted darkness and the light of day. 

While Lynov focused fully on the unremitting tragedy, Li’s performance was one that provided glimmers of hope amid a cataclysm. It was this hope that made the difference. And it also helped that the orchestra was performing the concerto for a second time in the evening, hence a better-oiled outing. 

The jury voted to award third place to Xu, second to Lynov and the crowning first to Li, who also won the prize for the best performance of J.S.Bach. A very bright musical future beckons.