Mel Bay's Creative Keyboard® Webzine | Misha Stefanuk - 7th Annual Chopin Youth Artist Competition

7th Annual Chopin Youth Artist Competition

Once again, I am in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the 7th Annual Chopin Youth Artist Competition, and the judging procedure is finished. Happy winners celebrate and go home, and you also see others who were not so fortunate to win. The first thing I need to say is that anyone who can make it through a Chopin Ballade at the age of seventeen is doing quite well. Most of Chopin's music is incredibly difficult to play. Add to that the fact that you have to play from memory, in front of over 300 people, on the piano that you have only touched for a minute or so before hand. You get the picture. So, everyone is a winner, in a way.

Judges at the 7th Annual Chopin Youth Artist Competition

Who does win the prize? Well, we have three judges, and we all made comments, and we all had our own ideas about who the winners should be. And again, like last year, our ideas were almost the same. Three judges- one originally from Poland, one from Russia and one from Singapore. What do we have in common? Music is the answer. The one and only universal language that unites people and makes them understand and feel the unity of us- the human race. Coming from literally all over the world, we did not disagree on whose performance was the best. So we obviously were listening to the same thing.

When I started playing piano at 5 I had no idea what I was in for. But I should say this- I liked the sound. I did not necessarily like the work, but I liked playing for people or for myself. I think the main criteria of every competition should be that the music has to sound good. As difficult as it is to learn an entire Chopin piece, if it does not sound good, it is all useless. There were some pianists that had their own interpretation of Chopin's music, interpretations with which we did not agree. As a matter of fact, one of them was a winner of one of the categories. But it actually was very exciting to all of us to see how a piece can be played differently, but still in the appropriate musical style.

The technical aspects of piano playing, there are so many! It is really hard to even start categorizing them. Shortly, anything that makes the music sound better works. So you can always be technically wrong about how you approach certain problem, you can have wrong suggestions from your teacher and such, but if you make the music sound good- that is all that matters.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and we hope to see more students next year!

Misha V. Stefanuk with Monika & Lidia Sobierajski

The Chopin Youth Piano Competition started as an original concept that was presented to The Polish Festival in Wisconsin by Monika & Lidia Sobierajski. The first competition took place on June 25, 1999. The first event had 13 contestants from the state of Wisconsin. Today we judged the finals which had 30 contestants in two age categories. The competition's current website is http://www.geocities.com/chopin_competition/.

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