Something of a veteran of competitions already - having won prizes in youth competitions as long ago as 2006, and more significantly the third prize in the 2013 Ferruccio Busoni Competition - Shishkin certainly showed that he knew how to pace himself across the gruelling three weeks in Warsaw. This time, though, the highest-ranking Russian was placed sixth in the final accounting: Dmitry Shishkin, who by the standards of Russian-schooled players had displayed quite a light touch. In the long history of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, it has been rare for Russia not to be represented among the laureates, and 2015 proved the rule again. Proof of COVID-19 vaccination and masks are required to enter Merkin Hall. View our current COVID-19 health and safety protocols. The sonata’s unpredictability, structural freedom and wide-ranging drama led Robert Schumann to claim it was too formless to even be called a sonata, but rather simply Chopin’s attempt to bind together four of his “most reckless children.” Was Schumann right, or was Chopin simply reinventing what a sonata could be in a way that Schumann was unable to grasp?įirst prize winner of the 2010 Naumburg International Piano Competition and the 2004 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, Korean-American pianist Soyeon Kate Lee has been lauded by The New York Times as a pianist with “a huge, richly varied sound, a lively imagination and a firm sense of style,” and by the Washington Post for her “stunning command of the keyboard.” Yet it leads to one of the most enigmatic finales ever written – a movement so strange that even today, it can sound like contemporary music. Written two years before the rest of the sonata, it is the emotional and structural heart of the entire work. It’s hard to imagine a movement of classical music more famous than the Funeral March of Chopin’s B-flat minor sonata, one of the most iconic and beloved piano sonatas ever written. Watch Rob Kapilow introduce the new season.

With host Rob Kapilow & Soyeon Kate Lee, piano

Chopin sonata in b flat minor