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

When he was 3 years old, Moscow native Ilya Shmukler’s mother found him jumping on the bed and beautifully singing Robertino Loreti’s “Jamaica;” she immediately recognized his musical talent and started him in lessons. It was important to his non-musician parents that he be raised as a well-rounded person, so his early years were also spent with school, table tennis, and ballroom dancing. But at 10, he says his life changed after applying for and winning his first music competition and attending the subsequent international summer academy: “There I discovered a true musical life, and I fell in love with it, inspiring me to commit my life to music.”

The 2025 Cliburn Competition will be broadcast live on Cliburn.org and the Cliburn’s YouTube channel, May 21–June 7.

Dance rhythms have always fascinated composers. J.S. Bach and his peers composed whole suites of music based on country dances. Chopin found inspiration in that realm and went into the countryside write his mazurkas. Ravel, Debussy, and Sibelius reframed the rhythms of dance through a more modern sensibility, and Stravinsky wrote music for dance his whole life!

The medalists of the 2022 Cliburn Competition—Yunchan Lim, Anna Geniushene, and Dmytro Choni—announce new dates for their 2024–2025 performance tours, including recent and upcoming highlights.

Let your imagination go wild as playful musicians impersonate the animal kingdom—from a stately lion and an energetic kangaroo to crazy donkeys and much more. All of this in the frolicsome setting of the Fort Worth Zoo, whose Animal Ambassadors will make special appearances throughout! Join us this fall as two pianos bring Saint-Saëns’ humorous suite, The Carnival of the Animals, to life like never before.

In Honggi Kim’s childhood home in Wonju, his sister played an electric keyboard; his parents then encouraged him to start learning the instrument after he played the same pieces she did, on his own, by ear. During his middle school years at art school in Seoul, he also studied composition, which he credits with deepening his understanding of music and its logic, so that he could develop his own interpretations.

Seoul native Jinhyung Park began studying piano at the age of 5 and made his recital debut 10 years later. After completing his bachelor’s degree in piano performance at Yonsei University under the tutelage of Ian Yungwook Yoo, he moved to Germany to study with Arie Vardi at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hannover.