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In the 15 years since he won Cliburn gold at the age of 19, Haochen Zhang has captivated audiences in the United States, Europe, and Asia with a unique combination of deep musical sensitivity, fearless imagination, and spectacular virtuosity.

Get a taste of the artistry and excitement of the upcoming 2025 Cliburn Competition! Bring your friends and family for a free concert featuring 2022 finalist Clayton Stephenson and the UNT One O'Clock Lab Band in this year's return of the Countdown to the Cliburn series.

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.

Marie-Josèphe Jude, jury member for the 2027 Cliburn International Competition for Young Pianists

When Arseniy Gusev was 5 years old, an upright piano was brought into his St. Petersburg home, and he immediately started playing and experimenting with it. He wrote his first piece—a romance on a Pushkin poem—shortly thereafter, and his grandmother asked him if he would like to go to music school. He went on to study both composition and piano performance at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Upon graduation in 2018, he moved to the United States, where he attends the Cleveland Institute of Music, under the tutelage of Sergei Babayan (piano) and Keith Fitch (composition).

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.”

Award-winning pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet enjoys a prolific recording and international concert career. He regularly works with orchestras such as The Cleveland, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony, and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony orchestras, and collaborates with conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Gianandrea Noseda, François-Xavier Roth, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Vasily Petrenko, Ludovic Morlot, Edward Gardner, and Sir Andrew Davis, among others.

Sergey Tanin started piano lessons when he was 5 years old, and—though his parents were not musicians and never pushed him to practice—his commitment to the instrument grew quickly. By age 9, he had decided to be a pianist. Growing up in Yakutia in far Eastern Russia, a long way from major cities and the concerts they might offer, he drew inspiration from recordings by great artists, such as Argerich, Pletnev, Michelangeli, and Rubinstein. He was “taken by the power of music.”

In this concert, 3 of 6 competitors will each perform concertos with Marin Alsop and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, immediately followed by the Competition Awards Ceremony.

A collection of Classical-era piano performances from Cliburn Competitions.