By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Vicky Chow knows when a pianist in a competition is giving a winning performance. It’s “when I feel like I’m not really judging a competition, but I’m at a concert.”
Ryan Lu made her feel that way during the finals of the 14th Annual David D. Dubois Piano Festival and Competition on Sunday.
The 14-year-old from New Jersey won the competition. Eight finalists performed Sunday after the field of 24 semi-finalists was winnowed on Saturday.
“For me the very first notes of his Beethoven had so much energy and spirit, yet clarity and control in the dynamics” said Gilles Vonsattel, the festival’s guest artist who joined Chow and Peter Takás, from Oberlin College judging. “There’s a certain ability to do what you want on the piano and communicate it to your audience. The rest of his playing confirmed that.”
The Chopin Rondo Lu played “had this great elegance and incredible clarity in the finger work.” His renditions of selections from “Gargoyles’ by contemporary composer Lowell Liebermann “were really imaginative.”
Chow and Vonsattel were impressed with the overall quality of the field.
“Everyone was so incredible,” Chow said. “I’m so impressed by the level that they’re playing at their age. For me what really set them apart was their level of musicality and their programming. All the programs were really dynamic. Their technical proficiency was way off the charts. Their level of sensitivity and interpretation and their intelligence in their playing –you have the technical proficiency but also the depth they brought.”
Asked if he could play that level when he was 14, the 42-year-old Vonsattel responded: “Absolutely not.”
“Something has happened in the last 20 years that’s really stunning,” Vonsattel said. It’s something he and his colleagues talk about. “There are pieces that were considered neigh impossible except for certain types of pianists are now being tossed off quite casually by teenagers. Something has been figured out,” he said.
“And yet the central issue of communicating character to an audience effectively remains a huge challenge for an interpreter. That’s not going away.”
He noted that 15-year-old Benjamin Luo performed Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Étude No. 13: L’escalier du diable.” Twenty years ago, when Vonsattel was at Juilliard, someone playing that piece would been consider audacious, yet Luo delivered it “note-perfect and controlled and exciting, and from memory. … That’s an empirical benchmark that has been breached.”
Luo received an honorable mention.
The award winners were:
- Ryan Lu, first place, $3,000
- Ella Kim, Herndon, Virginia, second place, $2,000
- Jarmin Weng, Vaughan, Ontario, $1,000
- Honorable mentions: Erik Jacoby, New Albany, Ohio, and Benjamin Luo, Apex, North Carolina.
Bob Swinehart the executor of the Dubois estate and a constant presence at the three-day festival said that “every year it has been better than the year before. The students are so talented.”
Dubois, an educator, author, consultant, and avocational musician, “would be a happy camper to see how this blossomed,” his long-time friends said.
The Dubois competition’s growing reputation is what attracted the winner to compete at BGSU.
Lu had heard about the competition from pianist friends, so he decided to enter.
He started showing interest in the piano at a young age, and his parents started having him take lessons when he was 5.
The family moved to New Jersey when he was 7 and he began studying with Stella Xu. It was at that point that “I started to know I wanted to pursue music in a bigger way,” he said.
Lu is driven to pursue excellence. “Every piece you can’t really perfect it; you can only improve,” he said “Like today I didn’t play perfectly at all. Chasing after that perfection, that’s really impossible (to achieve), that really keeps motivating me.”
The young pianist continues to refine his technique and tries “to understand what the composer wants to convey.”
While he is unsure whether he wants to pursue music as a career, he does know it will always be part of his life.
Bill Mathis, dean of the College of Musical Arts, said the Dubois Festival and Competition, has a lot of benefits for BGSU.
Hosting the event brings notoriety to BGSU.
It also gives BGSU students a chance to interact with the guest artist, who presents a master class on the first day. That artist performs a recital that’s open to the community.
The Dubois endowment also “provides a significant scholarship for recruiting,” he said.
Originally those scholarships were intended for participants in the competition, but working with Swinehart, those funds are now more broadly available, Mathis said. “That’s been a gamechanger” in terms of recruiting pianists.
One of the issues in attracting student to BGSU is that so many like Lu and Luo are on the younger end of the 14-18 eligibility range. They haven’t started thinking about where to go to college, Mathis said.
A number of Dubois participants have attended BGSU’s summer Piano Camp.
The piano faculty members offer Dubois participants lessons while they are on campus. Because of that they no longer serve as judges.
The competition and festival will continue as it has, said Laura Melton, the chair of performance studies and the coordinator of the event. She was responsible for bringing the festival to BGSU.
