Tomorrow's Talent

“I t’s not cut-throat, like the big Cliburn,” says Jacques Marquis, president and CEO of the Van Cliburn Foundation, soon to mount the International Junior Piano Competition at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts. “Everybody can play everything. The kids are so good, so young. We don’t launch careers. We put an atmosphere around them and let them grow. We give them an international perspective and vision, and do everything we can to open their minds to the real life of touring [while] practicing every day. They are like a big sponge.”

All this “raw talent,” as Jacques puts it, 24 competitors in all, plus 14 additional participants in the festival, ages 13 to 17, will pitch camp on or about May 31 in dormitories on the campus, the better to create a real community. Friendships are likely to last well beyond the final concert on June 8, 2019, when the top three winners will play at the Meyerson Symphony Center with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ruth Reinhardt, a winner herself who’s well on her way to an important career at the podium. “We want the surrounding to be perfect for the musicians,” Jacques insists. With Ruth Reinhardt and the DSO in the Meyerson it will be.

There will be master classes and chamber groups for the visiting prodigies (many having begun serious piano study sometimes as young as age four, according to Jacques, and no later than nine) along with sessions on stagecraft, social media, and how to meet donors after the show. For fun, they’ll hit venues such as NorthPark Center and Klyde Warren Park, where the final round will be simulcast, and host families will also make sure the kids sample some Texas eateries. But the main attraction is music. For that, Jacques Marquis has assembled a jury from around the world. “I chose the jury members,” he tells me at his office in downtown Fort Worth, “and I want them nice.” Moreover, he adds, “they give all their comments to the kids afterwards.” The idea is to be as helpful as possible. That’s what nice means.

The chairman of the jury this year is pianist Alessio Bax, who came to the Meadows School on a scholarship from Bari, in the Adriatic heel of Italy, when he was 16. He joined the faculty at 20, and now is artist-in-residence while also playing 100 concerts a year around the world. He will preside over six jurors, including composer Lowell Liebermann.

The first thing he must do is set the ground rules, the ethics of the operation, Alessio explains over lunch in New York where he lives with his wife, Lucille Chung, also a pianist/artist-in-residence at Meadows, and their four-year-old daughter Mila, who speaks English, Italian, and French and, of course, plays the piano in a special music school. “Some jurors want to know as much as possible about a pianist,” he says, “while some want to know nothing.” All this must be worked out before the young players, culled from 230 applications across 32 countries, hit Dallas, ready for action.

I meet a veteran of the Junior Cliburn one afternoon in the lobby of the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. It is Clayton Stephenson, winner of a Jury Discretionary Award four years ago when he was 15, back in Dallas to perform at a Cliburn event that night. He started playing the piano when he was seven with a garden-variety teacher in Brooklyn who was more “a babysitter,” he admits, than anything else. “I was a troublemaking kid,” Clayton confesses, “and my mom wanted me to sit for an hour.” She was an accountant, supporting the household pretty much on her own since Clayton’s father was not a lot in evidence in their life. He died two years ago.

Clayton couldn’t even sight-read music at that point, but pretended to, while actually playing by ear. There “were no Hanon Exercises, no Chopin,” he continues. Instead, “I played songs I liked…easy beginner’s [stuff]…I didn’t really know about my piano abilities…I never really considered myself to be good.” But astonishingly good he was, and that was impossible to miss. After two years, Clayton switched to a new teacher, near Chinatown on Brooklyn’s 8th Avenue. The barely budding pianist remembers the teacher “was very strict, traditional.” But that was exactly what was needed to catapult Clayton Stephenson into Juilliard’s Pre-College at the age of ten, and then to Harvard where he is now a sophomore majoring in economics (his mother wants some grounding for him) while pursuing a Master of Music degree at the New England Conservatory.

The Junior Van Cliburn was his first big competition. With no piano at home, he prepared by practicing at Juilliard. What he loved most about that time in Fort Worth, staying at TCU, was this: “They treat you like artists, not children.” His goal now? To compete in the next big Van Cliburn in 2021.

While Clayton Stephenson loves the Romantics—Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven, but he is not yet playing Bach—Alim Beisembayev, who at 17 scored first place in the inaugural Junior Cliburn, definitely revels in Bach, plus Mozart, Schumann, the Russian composers, and Debussy, whom he calls “incredibly creative.” Beethoven too, of course, who cannot be ignored. All this I learn in a phone interview with him, speaking from London where he’s been studying since he was 12, going back to Kazakhstan to visit his family only for the holidays. Alim first left home at 10 for a music school in Moscow. Currently at the Royal Academy of Music, he mentions his interest in contemporary works, which are “quite important,” he says, but “very difficult” to play with a chamber group. That’s because they are “not as straightforward as classical music, less harmonic…but much more fun to do.”

It can’t have been easy for his parents, not musical themselves, to let their only child go so far away, quite possibly never to return. “They thought it was good for me to get outside the line,” he tells me, “to go to London, learn the language and a new culture.” As for the United States, he has been here three times, and always for the Cliburn, which is adept at return engagements for its star performers.

Another star returning to Fort Worth this spring, to perform with Clayton Stephenson, is Youlan Ji, third-place winner of the 2015 Junior Cliburn. She started music lessons at four, taught by her mother, now a piano teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music in South China. Her father played an indigenous instrument with two strings and a bow—it makes “a mellow sound… like a cello,” she notes—in a traditional Chinese orchestra in Beijing. He wanted Youlan to learn it, and she tried “for a couple of days.” That was enough. Like Alim, she goes home once a year, usually in early summer, then hurries back to Aspen for the music festival. Come fall, it’s back to Juilliard where she has been studying since the seventh grade. Also an only child, she talks to her parents once a day, on FaceTime.

It is in New York that we meet for lunch during her spring break. Off for two weeks, she has been sleeping late and taking a painting class. “It was really fun,” she says, whipping out her phone to show me a landscape she did with tall, stylized tree trunks standing in puddles of pink leaves in an abstract river of blue. It is startlingly sophisticated, bristling with wit, and very impressive.

Artistry in one field, it seems, spills over into others. But for Youlan, music, of course, comes first. And music is making its way into more and more homes in China. “Everyone has a piano in the house,” Youlan reports. “When I was there, I could hear three neighbors practicing.” Is the government, I ask, involved in this? Her answer: “The government is definitely encouraging it.”

To the favorite composers already listed above, Youlan adds Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Haydn. But her number one is Bach. “Bach is very, very profound,” she declares, “and he is very romantic… Mozart [however] is the first music I felt I had a personal connection to. It is very intimate, and not as intimidating as Beethoven.”

Youlan makes a specialty of four-hand piano, two players at the same keyboard, a dazzling showstopper at concerts for Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung. It’s demanding, though. “You must be a hundred percent synchronized,” she points out. “It’s easier with strings, not so exact. The piano is harder because of the attack.” She loves the collaboration of chamber music, too, where “breathing together is important. It’s a natural motion [that’s essential to hitting] the beat together.” There’s more: “Breathe more, a teacher will say. A person who never pauses for breath is too fast and runs the notes together. The pace of the music gets too agitated too soon. We get too excited and sometimes we forget to play the music. We rush a lot.”

Youlan Li would resist rushing. She’s too intelligent not to pace herself in what she’s playing and in where she’s going, which is all the way to a PhD. What’s too often missing, though, is the opportunity to perform with an orchestra. That’s one reason The Cliburn was so spectacular for her. Like Clayton Stephenson, she hopes to make it to the big competition. And when she does, Youlan, like Clayton, will be a formidable presence, round after round.

I stopped by Dean Sam Holland’s office at the Meadows School to see if he is ready for what’s coming the end of May. Yes, certainly he is, with Caruth Auditorium all set for everything but the finals and upgraded practice pianos at the ready for the whiz kids about to arrive. According to Holland, every participant is a “potential student for Meadows.” He notes, “The level of the competition is stratospheric, [with] uncannily mature musicianship.”

BY LEE CULLUM