South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim, 18, has “become the youngest gold medal winner in the 60-year history of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition,” write Scott Cantrell and Tim Diovanni in Saturday’s (6/18) Dallas Morning News. “An awards ceremony Saturday night in Bass Performance Hall brought an end to a grueling 17-day schedule of solo recitals and concerto performances with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra by 30 young pianists from 15 countries…. The second-prize silver medal went to … 31-year-old Russian Anna Geniushene, and the third-prize bronze medal to [Ukrainian pianist Dmytro] Choni, 28…. Selections were made by an international jury including prominent concert pianists…. Lim’s stunningly virtuosic and mature performance of the Liszt Transcendental Etudes in the semifinal round carried the day…. Geniushene’s … performances of Brahms’ Op. 10 Rhapsodies and Beethoven’s Op. 33 Bagatelles were magical. Choni offered playing at once sophisticated and natural…. Geniushene, who is 6 ½ months pregnant, [said] … she is used to playing while pregnant, having done so before her first child was born…. At the awards ceremony, [Vadym] Kholodenko, the 2013 Cliburn gold medalist who was also born in Kyiv, stirringly played the Ukrainian national anthem.”
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