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发帖数: 538 | 1 WARSAW (Reuters) – Russia's Yulianna Avdeeva won the prestigious 2010
International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition Wednesday after a three-week
musical marathon followed by classical music lovers around the globe.
The competition, the oldest of its kind in the world, is held every five
years in the Polish capital and has built up an especially enthusiastic
following in Asia.
A jury that included several world-famous pianists such as Martha Argerich
and Kevin Kenner chose Avdeeva, 25, from among 10 finalists after lengthy
late-night deliberations at the end of a competition marked by the high
quality of its performances.
Ingolf Wunder of Austria and Lukas Geniusas of Russia/Lithuania won joint
second place, Russia's Daniil Trifonov came third and Bulgaria's Evgeni
Bozhanov fourth.
Avdeeva, whose expressive and mature performance of Chopin's Concerto in E
minor drew a standing ovation Tuesday evening, studied in Moscow and is now
working as an assistant to a Russian professor at the Hochschule fuer Musik
und Theater in Zurich, Switzerland.
Avdeeva has performed in more than 20 countries including the United States
and Japan and has won a number of prizes.
This year's 16th Chopin competition attracted especially strong interest
because it coincided with the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth --
to a Polish mother and French father -- in a village near Warsaw in 1810.
There were some 3,000 events including concerts dedicated to Chopin's
bicentenary worldwide in the first half of 2010 alone.
"MYSTIC QUALITY"
Of the 81 original finalists in this year's Chopin Competition, selected
after preliminary auditions in the spring, 16 were from Japan and 13 from
China, highlighting Asia's increasing clout in the field of Western
classical music.
However, no Asians were among the final 10 frontrunners playing before the
13-member jury in Warsaw's National Philharmonia this week.
That did not seem to cloud the excitement of the many Japanese, Korean and
Chinese visitors to Warsaw.
"I have come here (to the Philharmonia) every day since I arrived in Poland.
The level of playing is so high," said Misato Ota, a piano teacher from
Japan.
"We Japanese love Chopin for the delicacy and the mystic quality of his
music," she said, adding that she had wanted Polish finalist Pawel Wakarecy
to win the competition.
The oeuvre of Chopin, called "Prince of the Romantics" by his most recent
biographer Adam Zamoyski, ranges from elegiac sonatas to lively Mazurka folk
dances.
Chopin left Poland at the age of 20 and spent most of his adult life in
Paris but he remained a staunch patriot and his work is suffused with
nostalgia for his homeland, at that time partitioned between Russia, Austria
-Hungary and Prussia.
In exile, he counted fellow composers Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz and
artist Eugene Delacroix among his friends. He had a turbulent love affair
with the female novelist George Sand. Dogged by poor health, he died in 1849
aged just 39.
(Additional reporting by Sam Harcourt; Writing by Gareth Jones, editing by
Matthew Jones) |
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