The Cliburn's President and CEO Jacques Marquis on the Upcoming Competition

Tune in starting on May 21 to watch this year's competition on The Violin Channel

The Seventeenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition will be taking place from May 21 – June 7, 2025, in Fort Worth, Texas. Open to pianists of all nationalities, the event is welcoming 30 competitors for the Preliminary Round. Tune in to The Violin Channel to watch all rounds of the competition! 

We caught up with The Cliburn's President and CEO, Jacques Marquis, to learn more about the historic competition.

Tell us about the Cliburn Competition. When was it founded and what is its primary mission?

After Van Cliburn’s historic win at the first edition of the Tchaikovsky Competition during the Cold War, a group of volunteers from Fort Worth decided to inaugurate in 1962 a new piano competition in tribute of Van Cliburn.

The mandate was to help young exceptional pianists launch careers and to share classical music with the largest audience. Today, we’re still doing the same.

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s edition of the competition?

Each year, we welcome brand new artistic personalities. The Cliburn offers them a platform to express their talent, their vision, their originality, their emotions. Through our webcast streamed all around the globe, we enhance and empower their message, their “unique voice.”  I love discovering new “voices!”

What has changed about the competition since its founding? 

The Cliburn started as a volunteer-run organization. Through the years, we added professional staff and activities. But the volunteer spirit is strong at the Cliburn; even today, we have around 400–600 volunteers involved with the Competition.

The second major change was the addition of programs. Over the years, we added Cliburn Concerts (1977), a recital series presenting the best musicians in the world; the Amateur Competition (1999), for outstanding non-professional pianists 35 years and older; the Junior Competition (2015), for exceptional pianists between 13 and 17 years old; and many more regional programs, like Cliburn in the Classroom, Cliburn Festival, Cliburn Sessions, and Cliburn in the Community, as well as the expansion and constant fine-tuning of the winners’ career management program and the new Cliburn Agency.

Naturally, the way we share music has changed a lot over the years. The Cliburn has a devoted audience here in Fort Worth, but we have now a strong presence online with our high-level webcast and the production of multiple documentaries. We just launched a new album with Decca (Yunchan Lim’s historic Cliburn performance of the Rach 3, and we have major media relationships with Apple Music Classical and the Platoon record label, Carnegie Hall+, Amadeus (China), Medici, and the Violin Channel.

What do you look to improve upon each edition?

Artistically, we fine tune our process in any edition: scoring system, rounds, repertoire, recruitment, conductors, jury members, screening auditions, etc. Every little aspect can have an impact on the results.

What are the major qualities you are looking for in a potential winner?

The simple answer is that we want them to be ready to begin an active professional career with many concerts for the next three years. Therefore, we are looking for a clear artistic vision on the repertoire, stamina, and commitment. What is the most interesting for me is to be “surprised” by a candidate, by their choice of repertoire, their flexibility, their creativity, their capacity to take risks.

Like any audience, or any jury, we want to fall in love with them, and we want to listen to them again and again.

What does the winner receive?

The first three prizes receive career management support for the next three years. That means concert engagements (around $1.2 million in fees across the three medalists), plus recordings, new websites, professional pictures, training on social media, finance, marketing, etc.

As for cash awards, the gold medalist receives a prize of $100,000, silver $50,000, and bronze $25,000.

And, naturally, with the webcast exposure (we expect 25M views in 2025), every young pianist gets great visibility here and around the world during the Competition.

In your opinion, when is the ideal time for a young musician to pursue competitions?

I feel that the right time is a very personal decision. The last Competition (2022) we had the youngest ever winner (Yunchan Lim at 18) and the oldest medalist ever (Anna Geniushene at 31). Two fantastic artists had very different journeys prior to the Cliburn.

No matter their age, they have to be prepared. The Cliburn asks around 4 hours to 4 1/2 hours of music until the end, and everything must be ready at the top level. This can be challenging for younger artists at times, though we have many examples of exceptions to that: Yunchan, of course, but also Haochen Zhang (who was 19 in 2009), Nobuyuki Tsujii (20 in 2009), and Beatrice Rana (20 in 2013).

How do you think competitions can best propel musicians’ careers?

Above and beyond what I said earlier, a competition is a great way to compare yourself with others and a fantastic way to learn and really fine tune repertoire. The work you will have done doing so will never be lost.

Are there particular performances/interpretations that particularly stuck with you from past editions of the competition?

There are so many great interpretations from so many different pianists in so many rounds over so many years. But for this purpose, I’ll intentionally choose some memories of our last three gold medalists:

• • • Trois mouvements de Petrouchka of Vadym Kholodenko (Gold 2013)
    • Schubert Sonata in C minor D958 of Yekwon Sunwoo (Gold 2017)
    • Rachmaninoff Concerto #3 of Yunchan Lim (Gold 2022)