For 15 years, pianist Lisa Nakamichi has hosted the Aloha International Piano Festival, a modest competition that offered young pianists, most of them high-school age or younger, the opportunity to be judged by acclaimed musicians.
Now, Nakamichi has gone big, in both age and talent, with the inaugural Ke‘alohi International Piano Competition, a contest featuring young adult virtuosos from around the world.
“I wanted Hawaii to be hosting a big-league competition, on par with the big international competitions,” she said of the contest, which is expected to be held every three years. Its name, “Ke‘alohi,” means “brightest star” in Hawaiian.
The event will feature 15 pianists aged 18 to 29, selected from 35 applicants’ taped auditions, in three rounds of competition. It opens June 15 with two days of solo recitals at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Orvis Auditorium, and continues on June 19 at Orvis with six semifinalists performing concertos with a second piano accompaniment. Three finalists will then perform their concertos again on June 22 at Blaisdell Concert Hall, this time with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra.
Nakamichi, who has performed several times with the symphony as well as in Asia, promises the music will be top-drawer. “These 15 people who advanced to the live round in Hawaii are unbelievable,” she said. “They’re jaw-dropping amazing.”
Hawaii’s considerable talent pool of pianists will be represented by 18-year-old Jairus Rhoades of Mililani. He graduated this week from Punahou School, performing at its baccalaureate ceremony, and will attend Yale University to study music and biophysics in the fall.
He remembers his first interest in piano at age 3 after seeing a flyer at his preschool advertising lessons. “I somehow knew to bring that to my mom and ask her to sign up for those lessons,” he said. Several teachers would come and go in those first years, but they always referred him to another teacher. “I guess they sort of saw the enthusiasm,” he said.
He started studying with Joanna Zane-Fan at age 7, realizing after about two years with her that “this brings me enough joy to extend this to a career.”
“She knows how much I should let myself go when I’m interpreting a piece,” said Rhoades, who in his “ideal” scenario would like to practice five hours a day. In reality, he’s been so busy with school, contests and college visits that he’s down to about one.
Rhoades is less experienced than his competitors, but he’s not worried about it.
“I see it as them just having experiences, and don’t think about them having accomplishments,” he said. He has performed on NPR’s “From the Top” radio show, won Nakamichi’s Aloha Piano Festival and other state competitions, and taken prizes at contests in Ohio, North Carolina and New York.
He’ll be competing against musicians well on their way in their careers. Kai-Min Chang of Taiwan was a quarterfinalist at last year’s International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. Misha Galant from California was awarded best performance of a classical sonata at the 2015 Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition and Festival. Elzbieta Bilicka of Poland has released a well-received CD, “Lights & Shadows.”
Many contestants boast lineage from an impressive list of alma maters and mentors, a key measure of excellence in classical music. Galant, Jonathan Mamora of Southern California, Ji Youn Lee of South Korea, Kevin Ahfat of Canada and Zhiye Lin of China all studied at the famed Juilliard School in New York. Lin brings the added cache of currently studying with Richard Goode, one of the most venerated American pianists today.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, Richard Goode is actually sending a student to Ke‘alohi, this new competition,’ ” Nakamichi said. “I was thrilled with that fact and was hoping (Lin) would pass the preliminary auditions, and he did.”
The competition can be seen as part of a long, but perhaps underappreciated tradition of classical music in Hawaii. Kilin Reece of the Kealakai Center for Pacific Strings, who has researched the history of music in Hawaii, considers Honolulu in the mid-19th century to have been “one of the great epicenters of music culture in the world.”
“World-renowned soloists in the classical tradition have been visiting Honolulu since the 1840s on concert tours,” said Reece, who is planning to open an online museum of music history in the Pacific region in the fall. “Honolulu was a destination side-by-side with New York, San Francisco, Australia, Shanghai.”
He pointed out that Queen Lili‘uokalani and Queen Emma performed and composed for the piano. “They understood music at a really integral level, which allowed them to play not only piano, but also guitar, zither, autoharp, violin, flute, all these different instruments,” said Reece, adding that Lili‘uokalani had even wanted to establish a music conservatory here.
Nakamichi said the key to attracting such high-quality competitors was the cash prize. She drew on donors to her youth festival, coming up with total prize package of $20,000.
“I thought it was going to be difficult, but they were so excited that we’re finally having a ‘real’ competition in Hawaii,” she said. “These days, these young pianists won’t even look at competitions offering a couple thousand.”
Judging the competitors will be a panel of respected performers and teachers, all experienced in assessing whether the talent and ambitions of the competitors can lead to a career as a performer. It’s a tricky judgment to make, said Norman Krieger, one of the judges. He is the chairman of the piano department at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and is familiar to Hawaii audiences, having performed with the symphony several times and running a music festival on Kauai in the late 1990s.
“I’m interested in supporting talent and personality and people that have that nice balance between respecting the composer and internalizing that music and making it fresh, and sharing their love for the music,” he said. He listed several criteria that he looks for as a juror — “knowledge of the score, technique, sound quality, pedaling, balance, getting used to a piano that you’ve never played.”
Modern technology has placed a burden on young pianists, he said, because it has led to the expectation that performances be note-perfect. That can get in the way of artistry.
“Horowitz used to say he could play a recital and not miss a note if he would just not be as passionate,” Krieger said, referring to the renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz from Russia. “Some of the greatest concerts I ever heard in my life had Horowitz missing notes, because he took risks.”
Ever since Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn — then an almost unknown pianist from Texas — won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Russia in 1958, contests have become extremely important to a young pianist’s career, Krieger said. Taking place during the Cold War, that first contest was an historic event and gave Cliburn “instant world recognition,” Krieger said.
All major piano competitions require finalists to perform with a symphony as the ultimate test, and the performances can be a showcase for the orchestra as well. Joseph Stepec, who conducts the symphony’s Ohana Series and teaches at UH, will lead the orchestra for the finals. It will be the first time he has conducted for a piano competition, and he is looking forward to the challenge.
“I think to be a conductor you kind of have to be an adrenaline junkie,” he said. “As someone more or less at the beginning of my career, it’s exciting to chomp on.”
He expects to get about an hour’s rehearsal with each of the finalists. Seven concertos, by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, are on the list of possible repertoire, but the final program won’t be determined until three days before the performance.
“We’re all professionals, and the Hawai‘i Symphony, they’re able to play anything. There is this universal language of music,” he said. “We all take our inspirations from the same well.”
—
Ke‘alohi International Piano Competition
>> First round: 30-minute solo recitals. June 15, 10 a.m.-noon and 2-5:30 p.m.; June 16, 1-5:30 p.m. Orvis Auditorium, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Cost: Free
>> Semifinals: Piano concertos, with second piano accompaniment. June 19, 1-5:30 p.m. Orvis Auditorium. Cost: $20. Tickets: 808ne.ws/pianosemifinals
>> Finals: Piano concertos, performed with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra. June 22, 7:30 p.m., Blaisdell Concert Hall. Cost: $10. Tickets: ticketmaster.com
>> Note: The first round and the semifinals will be livestreamed at alink-argerich.org.
>> Info: alohapianofestival.org
