Vietnamese pianist wins high prize at Italian piano competition

"I am very grateful to my family, teachers and friends for all their sincere support. Thank you very much!", Quang wrote on his Facebook page.

The jury panel includes five respected members in the international academic arena of arts namely Olivier Cazal from France, Mario Coppola from Italy, Giuseppe Gullotta from Italy, Sofya Gulyak from Russia and  Wang Xin from China.

Pianist Luu Hong Quang successfully performed the masterpieces “Etude Tableaux op.33-9” (Rachmaninoff), “Apres une lecture de Dante” (Liszt) in the preliminary rounds and “Alborada del Gracioso” (Ravel), “Sonata Op.2 - N3” (Beethoven), “2 poems op.32” (Scriabin), and “Mephisto waltz” (Liszt) in the next rounds. The first prize belonged to a contestant from Russia while the Italian contestant won third prize. 

Earlier, the first edition of the competition attracted 80 contestants aged 18-37. After the qualifying round based on the contestants’ video clips, the jury chose 30 contestants for the final round, who were winners of various international contests, from Russia, Italy, France, Ukraine, Japan, China and Vietnam.

Each contestant had to pass two further rounds. The first round was for 20 minutes. Six contestants from the first round were selected for the second round, in which the contestants had to play for 50 minutes.

Quang is the son of Luu Quang Minh, a lecturer at the Vietnam National Academy of Music.  He was a member of the Vietnam National Academy of Music from 1997 to 2007.