Piano Competition Awards Concert
by
Lyn Bronson
Competition Winners Sara Sumitani, Katherine Lin and Elizabeth Schumann
On Saturday the Carmel Music
Society presented its 31st annual competition.
In alternating years the competition is open to vocalists,
instrumentalists and pianists. This was the year for pianists. A few months ago
CDs submitted by 36 young pianists from the states of California, Oregon and
Washington were screened by three pianists, Renée Bronson, Erik Dyar and Kumi
Uyeda. From the original 36 entries, eight finalists were selected to come to
Carmel to perform approximately 30 minutes of music on the stage of Sunset
Center for an audience and a panel of three judges —
Santa Clara University Professor Hans
Boepple, Portland State University Professor Emeritus Harold Gray and Monterey
Symphony Music Director Max Bragado-Darman.
It was a long day for the
contestants, judges and for members of the audience. The competition started at
10 AM and finished at 3:30 PM. But, there was more, for at 8 PM, an even larger
audience showed up at Sunset Center to hear an awards concert by the three prize
winners: grand prize winner Elizabeth Schumann, second prize winner Katherine
Lin, and third prize winner Sara Sumitani. Before the concert, Carmel Music
Society President Peter Thorp and Treasurer Anne Thorp called the winners to the
stage to congratulate them and present certificates.
The concert began with third
prize winner Sara Sumitani, 24, a
piano performance major at USC. Sumitani opened her program with the simple, but
heartfelt Bach Prelude and Fugue in B-flat minor from WTC I. After a wild and
exciting performance of the Liszt/Verdi “Rigoletto” Paraphrase, she showed yet
another facet of her personality in Ravel’s Ondine from Gaspard de
la nuit. It was, however her final selection that really captured the
hearts of the audience, and this was the jazzy set of variations by Nikolai
Kapustin written in 1984. Sumitani blazed her way through this attractive work
and entertained us thoroughly.
Next to perform was second
prize winner Katherine Lin, 20, also
a piano performance major at USC. Ms. Lin, it has to be said, astonished
listeners with her imaginative performance of Corigliano’s Fantasia on an
Ostinato. When she started her performance, it appeared she was silently
removing a piece of lint from one of the piano keys with a repetitive motion of
her right hand wrist and third finger. As this massaging motion went on and on,
we gradually became aware that she was playing one note over and over again, but
so softly at first that the audience was unable to hear it. This, it turned out
was the beginning of this fascinating piece that developed complexity, tension,
and a whole bunch of surprises — not the least of which was at the end, a
literal quote of the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony. The first movement of the Clementi Sonata in B-flat Major that
followed was a marvel of clarity and refinement, as well as a vibrantly exciting
display of precision and rhythmic solidity. Her ending selection, the
Wagner/Liszt Isoldens Liebestod was
so involving that it became a kind of out-of-body experience that encircled and
enveloped you. It was an amazing, and a far more intense experience than it had
been during her afternoon’s performance.
After intermission we heard
the grand prize winner, Elizabeth
Schumann, 25, a young professional already with some impressive experience
and prestigious awards to her credit. Schumann changed the order of her program
from what we heard earlier in the day, so that her playing began with the
Beethoven Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 27, No. 1, rather than the “Etude Fantasy:
Fifths to Thirds” by Corigliano, perhaps a change that did not work to her
favor, for it was the startling qualities in the Corigliano beginning her
program that had made such a powerful effect earlier in the day, but made less
of an effect coming after the Beethoven.
Her program ended with two Schubert songs transcribed by Liszt,
Gretchen am Spinnrade and
Der Erlkönig, and these were
impressive performances. How she could
play the repeated octaves in Der Erlkönig
and keep them so beautifully under control was amazing. Her ability to create
such different sounds to suggest the father, the son and the Erlkönig was
uncanny. For an appreciative audience, she played one encore: the Schumann/Liszt
Widmung.
Members of the audience who
were there earlier in the day also heard some fine playing by the other
finalists, all of whom performed on a very high level. The first performer of
the day was Valerie
Stern, 23, a recent graduate from
USC, who impressed us with her exciting and moving performances of two works by
Rodrigo, Plegaria de la Infanta de
Castilla and Preludio al galla
mananero, as well as a sensitive performance of the first movement of
Schumann’s Fantasy in C, Op. 17. Amy
Toscano, 27, performed a powerful “Scarbo”
from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and a
lovely sounding version of Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 4.
Joonhee Kim, 29, who is pursuing her
professional studies diploma at the San Francisco Conservatory, performed the
only Scarlatti and Debussy heard during the proceedings and impressed us with a
fine performance of the rarely-heard Ballade No. 2 in B minor by Liszt.
David Ta-Chen Lee, 22, a recent
graduate of Stanford who earned a BS in Biological Sciences and the BA in Music,
impressed us with one of the most difficult programs that included
Ondine and
Scarbo from Ravel’s
Gaspard de la nuit, plus the very difficult Rachmaninoff Prelude in B-flat
Major, Op. 23, No. 2. Anyssa Neumann,
22, a recent graduate of the Manhattan School of Music in New York City,
performed a large-scaled rendering of Bach’s Partita No. 4, a solid and
expressive performance of Beethoven’s Op. 109, and an absorbing Wagner/Liszt
Liebestod.
