By Daniel Buckwalter
It’s the Steinway and the pianist on stage. That’s it. Nothing more, and the entire night had the feel of an athletic event.
Questions surface: Is the grand piano a thoroughbred racehorse that the pianist must guide with care to the finish line as a jockey would, or is the grand instrument a bull, and the pianist a matador trying to tame it — and are we therefore all like witnesses to an Earnest Hemingway short story?
Questions aside, a good-size audience heard riveting piano playing on Oct. 10 from four finalists in the first-ever Murdock International Piano Competition at the University of Oregon’s Beall Concert Hall.
The competition is the passion project of the co-founders of the Oregon Piano Institute, the husband-and-wife team of Alexandre Dossin (artistic director) and Maria Dossin (president).
“Long needed,” Maria Dossin told me during the Saturday night intermission, adding that it’s the only competition in Oregon and one of just a handful in the western United States.
It is named after the Eugene couple James and Marilyn Murdock, who have been major benefactors to the Oregon Piano Institute and the piano competition that bears their name.
The three-day affair, all of it at Beall Hall, began with a concert on Oct. 8. Then eight semifinalists gathered for what promised to be (and was) a physically and mentally taxing two days that saw seven sessions overall.
The four finalists out of the more than 180 international participants — Solomon Ge of the United States, Zhu Wang of China, Seongwoo Moon of Korea and Huan Li of China — all had to play “Nocturne, Intermezzo and Postlude” by Ivan Filichyk, a native of Belarus who won the Murdock IPC Composition Award.
After that, the pianists were on their own for the 35 to 40 minutes they were on stage, and the wide range of repertoire was extraordinary.
Li played Leoš Janáček’s Sonata 1.X.1905 and Ludwig van Beethoven’s beautiful Sonata No. 32 in C minor. Moon played Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 4 in D Major and the lyrical Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp by Alexander Scriabin.
Ge shone with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor and Johannes Brahms’ Variations and Fuge on a Theme by Handel, and Wang went an extra mile with Robert Schumann’s Humoreske in B-flat Major, Jörg Widmann’s “Humoresken” and Béla Bartók’s Sonata, Sz. 80.
The virtuosity of all four pianists was amazing. There was technical brilliance accompanying a deep sense of lyricism with all of them. No one missed as far as I could tell, and how the semifinal and finalist judges — Bernadene Blaha, Angela Cheng, Steven Spooner and Alvin Chow — could make up their minds was beyond me.
But a winner was named. Seongwoo Moon became the first winner of the Murdock International Piano Competition and claimed the $7,000 prize. Solomon Ge finished second, Huan Li third (as well as winning the Audience Choice Award) and Zhu Wang fourth.
This was an intense two days of competition. When it became evident that he was being named the winner, Moon slumped in his chair on stage for a moment to gather his thoughts. The energy and focus he and the others exhibited was formidable.
Bravo to each one of them.
And then on to next year for another Murdock International Piano Competition.
