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Born in Perth, Australia, Shuan Hern Lee started taking piano, vocal, music theory, and composition lessons with his father, Yoon Sen Lee, when he was 2½ years old. His childhood home was filled with music at all hours of the day, as both parents taught piano.

When he was a child, Ziyu Liu’s parents discovered that he could memorize melodies of songs and play them, without any instruction, on their electric keyboard. They bought him a piano, and he started learning on his own. At the age of 11, he decided that he wanted to become a professional pianist because of the joy he got from communicating with others through music.

After Vitaly Starikov completed his studies at the Ural Special Music School in his native Yekaterinburg, his “dream came true” when he began studying with Vera Gornostayeva, one of the world’s most venerated teachers, at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. At that time, her student, Vadym Kholodenko, had just won the 2013 Cliburn Competition, which “greatly inspired” Vitaly: “and it was then that the thought was born to someday participate in this competition.”

The prizes and awards for the 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition

Tianxu An, from Baoding, near Beijing, is a sought-after young artist, both at home in China and around the world. In June 2019, Tianxu drew international attention when he won fourth prize and a special prize for “courage and restraint” in the XVI International Tchaikovsky Competition—the highest award for a Chinese pianist at that contest in 17 years. A month later, he made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Center.

The Cliburn is pleased to announce the new Gold Medal Patron premium subscription packages for the seventeenth edition of its flagship Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, taking place May 21–June 7, 2025, at Van Cliburn Concert Hall at TCU and Bass Performance Hall, in Fort Worth, Texas, USA.

Milan native Francesco Granata’s journey with music began when he was 5 and has not stopped since. He graduated from the Milan Conservatory in 2016, with the highest evaluation and special mention. He then had the opportunity to study under two distinguished Cliburn laureates: Benedetto Lupo at the St. Cecilia Academy in Rome, where he obtained the Master Course Diploma, and—now—Roberto Plano at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.

Tokyo-born Yuki Yoshimi did not decide to pursue music professionally; he first “met the piano” at a friend’s house when he was 5 years old and has “loved the piano since then.” A graduate of the Toho Gakuen School of Music, where he worked with Hisako Ueno and Kei Itoh, his studies eventually brought him to the United States; he has attended the New England Conservatory of Music under Alexander Korsantia since 2020.

Andrew Li credits his time in the Harvard University/New England Conservatory of Music joint program with substantially aiding in his development as a musician and a human being. He is currently finishing a bachelor’s degree in human evolutionary biology and a master’s in piano performance, the latter under the guidance of Wha Kyung Byun, with whom he has studied since the age of 12.

Born into a family of pianists in Riga, Latvia, Georgijs Osokins began his studies at the age of 5 with his father, Sergejs Osokins. After 12 years at the Emīls Dārziņš Music School, he studied with Sergei Babayan at The Juilliard School in 2015, then moved to Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf to study with Georg Friedrich Schenck. He finds “consistent development” to be the hallmark of a great musician: “only when an artist fully embraces his responsibility of being the linking element between the creator and the recipient, can he start to generate art himself.”