The Awards

They are as follows:

First Prize (Gold Medal): Awarded jointly to Nobuyuki Tsujii and Zhang Haochen.

Second Prize (Silver Medal): Son Yeol-eum.

No third prize awarded.

Best Chamber Music Performance: Awarded jointly to Evgeni Bozhanov and Son Yeol-eum.

Best Performance of New Work: Nobuyuki Tsujii.

Jury Discretionary Awards: Alessandro Deljavan, Lukas Vondracek, and Eduard Kunz.

Audience Award: Mariangela Vacatello.

Youth will be served, it seems. Funny, when Cliburn foundation president Richard Rodzinski mentioned during the speech that the Cliburn jury was asked to focus on the three-year commitment of concerts that goes with the top prize and who was ready to fulfill that now, I thought for sure the gold was going to one of the older competitors.

My fantasy of a woman winning this competition outright for the first time in 43 years is kaput. Well, at least we got an all-Asian medal podium. It was all headed in this direction, and now we're here. As for the two gold medalists, I'm not sure if this is too much too soon for them, but they are both undeniably prodigious talents, and they both had moments when they amazed me. Let's see where they go. I'll have one more post later to wrap things up.