By Laurie Niles: Congratulations to the 12 semi-finalists announced today in the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition! They are: ![Shanghai semi-finalists and jury]()
Semi-finalists in the Shanghai competition, with jury members standing behind them.
The semi-final rounds will begin on Saturday and you can find the livestream on the Violinist.com Facebook page (click here). There will be two groups of semi-finals: during Aug. 18-20 rounds, participants will perform a Haydn quartet movement with the Shanghai Quartet, a sonata and a Fritz Kreisler piece. During rounds Aug. 23-24, each must each perform Mozart Concerto No. 5, with their own cadenzas. The final rounds, Aug. 30 through Sept. 1, require the performance of a work written by Chinese composer Qigang Chen, "La joie de la souffrance," as well as a major violin concerto (Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Glazunov, Prokofiev 1, Dvorak or Bernstein Serenade). Winners will be announced Sept. 1.
The jury for the SISIVC 2018 is co-chaired by conductor David Stern, son of Isaac Stern, and Vera Tsu Weiling, who is professor of violin at both Shanghai and Beijing Conservatories. Other members of the jury include violinists Maxim Vengerov and Augustin Dumay; violin pedagogues Zakhar Bron, Dora Schwarzberg and Daniel Heifetz; leaders in China's violin scene Lina Yu and Siqing Lu; Shanghai Quartet violinist Weigang Li; Emerson Quartet violinist Philip Setzer; former NY Phil concertmaster Glenn Dicterow; Munich Philharmonic concertmaster Sreten Krstic; artist manager Martin Campbell-White and Philharmonie de Paris programming director Emmanuel Hondré.
The competition includes a grand prize of $100,000. Second prize will be $50,000 and third prize $25,000, with a prize of $10,000 awarded for the best performance of the Chinese work, Qigang Chens "La joie de la souffrance." A $10,000 Isaac Stern Prize also will be awarded to an individual in any field and from any part of the world who is deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding of humanity through music.
Winners in the 2016 Shanghai competition included first-prize winner Mayu Kishima of Japan, with Sergei Dogadin of Russia coming in second and Serena Huang of the United States third.You might also like:
- Diana Tishchenko, Ukraine
- Alex Zhou, United States
- Arsenis Selalmazidis, Greece
- Chang Yuan Ting, Canada
- Nancy Zhou, United States
- Olga roubková, Czech Republic
- Quanshuai Li, China
- Jia Yi Chen, China
- Sophia Su, United States
- Yige Chen, China
- Yurina Arai, Japan
- Yun Tang, China
Semi-finalists in the Shanghai competition, with jury members standing behind them.