A stunning start to the Sydney International Piano Competition, 17 days of pianistic heaven on a stick.

Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

Reviewed on 5 July, 2023

by Steve Moffatt on 7 July, 2023

It has been seven years since audiences sat in a concert hall to hear 32 musicians aged from 18 to 32 years thrash it out for a prize in the Sydney International Piano Competition, AKA The Sydney.

The four-yearly cycle was thrown out of sync by the pandemic with the 2020 event postponed to 2021 and going online, with contestants submitting their own videos for assessment.

Now it is time for the reconfigured 2023 event – which runs from 5–22 July – and the audience was back in Sydney Conservatorium’s magnificent Verbrugghen Hall for an opening Gala Concert with a new twist.

Instead of the traditional opening showcasing the previous prizewinner, Artistic Director Piers Lane staged a recital featuring glittering performances by seven of the eight jury members who will assess the 32 preliminary rounds (20 minutes each); 16 semi-finals (65 minutes), starting 12 July, and the four final concerto rounds at the Opera House with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to see who takes home the $205,500 prize money, including the $50,000 for the overall winner.

As well as the solo recitals the 16 semi-finalists, drawn from a field which includes three Australians and only five women, will perform a chamber work with SSO concertmaster Andrew Haveron or top Australian cellist Li-Wei Quin.

Konstantin Shamray performs at The Sydney 2023. Photo © Jay Patel

The Gala was opened by Konstantin Shamray, the Russian-born Adelaide-based pianist who took out the 2008 competition with a unique double, winning the jurors’ and audience prizes.

As SIPC is sponsored by three piano brands – Steinway, Kawai and Fazioli – instruments are rotated throughout the two weeks so that each competitor reaching the finals gets to play all three, and the three grands were given a road test in this concert so the judges could get a feel of them as well as assess the hall’s acoustics.

Shamray, on a Kawai, got the evening off to the perfect start with a beautifully articulated pearly reading of Le rappel des oiseaux from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Suite in E minor, followed by rollicking version of Tambourin from the same work.

Contrast, and drama, came with the next work, Alexander Scriabin’s passionate, anguished and episodic Sonata No. 7 (White Mass) – one of the works, along with the companion Black Mass Sonata, in the prescribed repertoire for this year’s event. Here Shamray showed his customary control, elegance and power. He was later to reveal his well-developed humorous side in a show-stopping duet with Haveron, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s hilarious Figaro Concert Rhapsodie on Rossini’s Barber of Seville.

Chinese pianist Xiaohan Wang played two of his own compositions, a pair of beautiful impressionistic impromptus inspired by Chinese paintings. The head of piano at Juilliard’s Tianjin pre-college campus near Beijing, Wang showed himself to be an accomplished colourist in the Debussy tradition, but with his own distinctive voice.

Like all the judges flown in from overseas, Hong Kong-born Tanya Bannister was somewhat jet-lagged, telling her audience that her choice of repertoire was apt: Leos Janacek’s late piano cycle In The Mists, written at a time when he was still grieving for his daughter Olga, as well as being trapped in an unhappy marriage and having little success in Prague opera houses.

There was no sign of fatigue, however, and this was a bravura performance of the four movements that, like Wang’s miniatures, owed something to Debussy.

German pianist Uta Weyand specialises in Spanish music, particularly the works of neglected Catalan composer and musicologist Xavier Montsalvatge whose Sonatine pour Yvette, which opened her set, she performed for him at his 90th birthday celebration. This utterly charming work, written for his daughter when she was a child, ends in a boisterous take on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

To complete the Spanish bracket Weyand played a non-Hispanic mazurka by Enrique Granados.

Lane was joined by English pianist and Yo Yo Ma collaborator Kathryn Stott for a ravishing duet between Fazioli and Steinway in Sergei Rachmaninov’s Romance from Suite No. 2 Op. 17, followed by a thunderous and finely co-ordinated Tarantella – the first of two frenzied spidery dances of the night – from the same work.

Ukrainian-born Australian maestro Alexander Gavrylyuk closed the Gala Concert with another demonic barnstormer – Franz Liszt’s Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli – with its rapid repeated notes and cascading arpeggios lifting the hairs of the audience’s collective neck.

A stunning start to 17 days of pianistic heaven on a stick.