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Alexei Tartakovski Wins Westport's International Piano Competition

Judges refer to the 20-year-old pianist as a "first-rate player."

After three hours and six finalists, Alexei Tartakovski was announced the first-place winner of the 2009 Heida Hermanns International Piano Competition.

Tartakovski played the first movement of Sonata in B Minor by Franz Liszt and Fantasy in B Minor, opus 28, by Alexander Scriabin.

Tartakovski, 20, was the youngest finalist in the competition. Born in March 1989 in Moscow, Russia, he moved to the United States with his family as an infant. 

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He began playing piano as a 6-year-old in Gainesville, Fla. 

In 2005, he entered the Juilliard Pre-College Division to study piano with Julian Martin and conducting with Julien Benichou. Tartakovski now attends the Aaron Coplan School of music at Queens College, where he is studying with Nina Lelchuk. 

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In 2007, he was chosen to perform in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, as a winner of the American Fine Arts Festival. He received the first prize in the piano category for his performance at Weill Recital Hall.

Tartakovski won the Heida Hermanns competition with a unanimous decision by three judges who called him a "phenomenal pianist" and "first-rate player." 

"Thank you for listening so well," Tartakovski told the audience after the winners were announced. "And thanks for the judges. It was an overall wonderful experience."

Like all the competitors, Tartakovski took a few moments to compose himself before playing. 

"I counted in my head quietly to 30," he said of his concert ritual. "It's very effective. It helps to get into the mood of the piece."

While technique, musicianship and vision are all elements judges look for in selecting a winner, they also look for someone who is in tune with the performance.

"You're always looking for someone who touches you because music should be an emotional experience," Westport judge Gayle Martin Henry said. "(Tartakovski) is a monumental talent. He has such a clear vision and ability to listen to himself. He is very special."

Though Tartakovski goes home with the $5,000 first prize, the remaining finalists won't leave empty handed.

Igor Pancevski, originally of Macedonia, earned the second-place prize of $2,500 for his performance, playing a repertoire of Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Dutilleaux.

Though Pancevski said he played well, he also said his fellow competitors were "incredible." He's pleased he won a prize and said he'll use the money to pay his rent in San Francisco, Calif.

Sun-A Park of Korea and Di Yi Tang of China tied for the third place prize, each earning $1,000. Pavel Gintov of Ukraine and Alexandra Beliakovich of Belarus earned honorable mentions and $500 each.

Though all the finalists wanted to win the top spot, they agreed they were in good company with high-quality pianists.

For Di Yi Tang, who played the Romeo and Juliet Suite by Sergei Prokofiev, he said the "passionate audience" helped him feel supported.

"Each piece is like a total different story that you have to emotionally and mentally prepare for to be a part of it," he said.  

With a third-place prize, he plans to use the winnings to continue his creativity. "For me, I want to create more music and make people happy. That is what is most important."

That's a desire shared by many of the pianists who competed in the 2009 Heida Hermanns International Piano Competition.

 

About the Competition

Hermanns, a long-time Westport resident, was a concert pianist and premier music lover and promoter.  In 1973, she founded this competition which was later renamed in her honor.

The competition has enhanced the careers of an impressive number of today's internationally acclaimed musical stars.  Former competition winners include pianists Frederic Chiu, Andrew Armstrong, Max Levinson, and Christopher O'Reilly; clarinetists Igor Begelman, Charles Neidich and Todd Palmer and saxophonist Otis Murphy

Contributions from the Heida Hermanns Foundation and from generous donors support this annual event.

Hermanns grew up in an atmosphere of competition and loved it.  A Jewish refugee, Hermmans fled Nazi Germany with her husband, Artur Holde. Artur became her agent, and for many years, Heida had a very successful concert career.  Artur and Heida eventually moved to Westport.

Heida coordinated the first competition in 1972, before there was an organization to support it.  The following year, Performers of Southern Connecticut (POSC) was established. Its  membership consisted mostly of performing musicians.  Concerts held in private homes were started to raise money for the competition.  House concert artists donated their performances, and the revenue from ticket sales supported the competition.

As the activities of POSC expanded throughout Connecticut, the name was changed to Performers of Connecticut.  The membership gradually evolved to be more audience-based than performer-based, and so the name was changed again, in 1997, to Connecticut Alliance for Music .

The Heida Hermanns Competition started as a local Connecticut competition for all instruments.  As time progressed, the competition grew to an international contest, the Board decided that it would be better to have individual categories - piano, woodwinds, voice and strings.  The alliance then decided to have two separate competitions - woodwinds and piano one year, voice and strings the next - with a final concert of three winners from each division. 

In 2007, the CAM Board voted to focus on two major areas in order to build on its success, now offering competitions for piano and voice in two-year rotations.  

About Heida Hermanns

Heida Hermanns received her first piano lessons from her mother, Alice Goldschmidt Hermanns, and when she was 15 she enrolled at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik. Her teachers included Egon Petri, Artur Schnabel, Carl Friedberg and Isabella Vengerova.

She made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic when she was 18 and toured Europe as a recitalist and concerto soloist through the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1931 she married Artur Holde, a music critic and author. They immigrated to the United States in 1936.

Heida made her New York debut at Town Hall in 1942, and gave annual recitals that often included works by Busoni, Dussek, Kodaly and other composers whose works were not in the mainstream repertory. Her interest in unusual works brought her to the attention of the Society for Forgotten Music, with which she appeared several times.

As a chamber music player,  she performed regularly with John Corigliano, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic (and the father of the composer of the same name). She also gave duo-piano recitals and made recordings with Ruth Steinkraus Cohen.

Heida was  a supporter of the Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts. When the Westport Arts Center was built in the mid-1980s, she underwrote its concert hall, which is called Artur Holde Hall after her husband, who died in 1962.


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