Leeds International Pianoforte Competition

Unless you've been locked up in a practice room somwhere, you probably already know that the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition is underway. The website for the competition is right here.

Here's the list of competitors. (It includes some relatively new faces to the competition circuit, more than a few who surely must be pushing against the upper-age limit for most competitions (Roberto Plano) and more than mere smattering of those who didn't make the cut at the last Van Cliburn International Piano Competition):

SooJin AHN
Soo Jung ANN
Arta ARNICANE
Sanja BIZJAK
Andrew BROWNELL
Sheng CAI
Jie CHEN
Jae-Won CHEUNG
Rufus CHOI
Geoffrey COUTEAU
Daniel DE BORAH
Marco FATICHENTI
Martina FILJAK
Grace FONG
Tanya GABRIELIAN
Boris GILTBURG
Andrey GUGNIN
Yewei HUANG
Chu-Fang HUANG
Yurino IZUMI
Gintaras JANUSEVICIUS
Sergey KASPROV
Yusuke KIKUCHI
Tae-Hyung KIM
Sunghoon KIM
Sunwook KIM
Sangyoung KIM
Tatiana KOLESOVA
Alexey KOLTAKOV
Denis KOZHUKHIN
Eduard KUNZ
Alexey KURBATOV
Sergey KUZNETSOV
Konstantin LAPSHIN
Dmitri LEVKOVICH
Ang LI
Andrei LICARET
Joanna MARCINKOWSKA
Ratimir MARTINOVIC
Maria MAZO
David McGRORY
Jose MENOR
Vladimir MILOSEVIC
Yurie MIURA
Mikhail MORDVINOV
Fionnuala MOYNIHAN
Spencer MYER
Nikita MYNDOYANTS
Soheil NASSERI
Pavlin NECHEV
Adam NEIMAN
Eldon NG
Naariya NOGI
Esther PARK
Roberto PLANO
Andrey PONOCHEVNY
Tom POSTER
Elizabeth Joy ROE
Ivan RUDIN
Jie-Yern RYU
Mayumi SAKAMOTO
Serhiy SALOV
Regina SHENDEROVICH
Irina SHKURINDINA
Yeol-Eum SON
Siheng SONG
Piotr SZYCHOWSKI
Young-Ah TAK
Anna TYSMAYEVA
Gabriela UNGUREANU
Mariangela VACATELLO
Mimi Jue WANG
Chi WU
Mu-Ye WU
Di WU
Chen Xin XU
Andrius ZLABYS
Xiang ZOU

My quick pick going into it is the incredible Chu-Fang Huang. It will also be interesting to see how Maria Mazo fares after having put all her eggs in one basket, always a big gamble, with a single work (Beethoven's Hammklavier) at the Cliburn, she strikes me as worthy a serious second hearing.

And hear them you can via the BBC Radio. Very nice.