What’s the most valuable prize a major music competition can offer? More than money and fame, it’s surely the promise that the talents of the winners will be supported and guided in the disorientating weeks and years that follow their victory.

When he won the inaugural Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, Van Cliburn became world-famous overnight. We live in different times now. The competition that bears Cliburn’s name knows that handing victory to a pianist is just the start. What follows is a three-year process of tailored, personal support that ensures the artist becomes everything they can be.

Perhaps that’s why laureates of the Cliburn are making their way at the top of the profession with such assurance. Music lovers know they can trust a Cliburn winner, and Cliburn winners know they can trust the quadrennial competition to offer them all they’ll need in the dizzying months following victory in North Texas.

Few victories at the Cliburn have been as emphatic as that of Yunchan Lim, who broke records at the 2022 Competition when he became the youngest-ever Gold Medal winner at just 18. It has been impossible not to hear of this most serious of pianists ever since, not least after he won two Gramophone Awards in 2024 – for Young Artist of the Year and the top prize in the Piano recording category for his recording of Chopin’s Études, Opp 10 and 25. While impressing serious pianophiles and record collectors, he also attracts millions of viewers on the Cliburn’s YouTube channel.

Another Korean had broken a record at the previous competition. In 2017, 28-year-old Yekwon Sunwoo became the first pianist from his nation to claim the Gold Medal – his victory sealed by a sensational performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3. Vital partnerships were made in the months that followed. In 2020 the pianist released the first record of his new deal with Decca – an all-Mozart album – followed in 2023 by a Rachmaninov album.

The year 2013 saw Kyiv-born Vadym Kholodenko claim victory and slip immediately into classical music’s top echelons, working with the likes of Antonio Pappano, Iván Fischer and Myung-Whun Chung. A ‘truly outstanding’ Gramophone Editor’s Choice recording of the Grieg Concerto followed, coupled with an account of Saint-Saëns’s Second Concerto described in the same review by Jeremy Nicholas as ‘the most consistently accurately observed reading on disc’. A string of varied and meticulous recordings for Harmonia Mundi, Alpha, NIFC and others followed.

But there was, of course, another standout pianist in the Grand Final that year – a certain Beatrice Rana. Few artists have endeared themselves to the worldwide musical community like this Italian, who took Silver Medal in Fort Worth and has rarely been out of International Piano or Gramophone’s pages since, whether winning Artist of the Year at the 2017 Awards, adorning the cover of Gramophone in November 2019 or taking Editor’s Choice accolades for recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and music by Ravel and Stravinsky. Rana has proved a breath of fresh air in the piano world. A pianist renowned for her sustained excellence, she benefited hugely from the exposure of performing at the Cliburn at an early stage in her career, boosting her development and public profile before she signed for Warner Classics.

Even for the leading international piano competition – one known as the barometer of worldwide pianistic talent – 2009’s crop of medallists was exceptional, with all three pianists now renowned exponents of the instrument with a distinctive artistic profile of their own. Silver Medallist Yeol Eum Son, with her crystalline touch and rare ability to conjure an atmosphere of intimacy, impressed the discerning audience at the BBC Proms in 2019 and has since proved herself a force to be reckoned with in a wide range of repertoire.

As for the winners, it was not difficult to fall for Nobuyuki Tsujii, the self-effacing pianist from Japan who overcame huge life hurdles to win a joint victory with his Chinese counterpart Haochen Zhang. The two artists complemented one another perfectly: Tsujii a born communicator with a songful touch and huge heart; the latter a pianist’s pianist who has since recorded staples of the Central European piano repertoire including a ‘light, transparent, direct and poetic’ account of Schumann’s Kinderszenen while winning an Editor’s Choice for his ‘irresistibly lithe’ (Patrick Rucker) complete Beethoven concertos, his Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev concertos and most recently for his ‘stunning’ account of Liszt’s Transcendental Études.

Nobuyuki, meanwhile, has become a symbol of humanity as much as of music, a pianist who can still draw collaborators into new states of listening but who has broken beyond the confines of the classical music world much like another pianist associated with the competition – Van Cliburn himself.

The Cliburn has long set its sights on no less an ambitious task: to prove that music can make a difference in the world. It is proud to have advanced the careers of hundreds of artists who still carry the Cliburn flame with them. Tune in to the Seventeenth Van Cliburn Competition – livestreaming from 21 May – to see who’ll be joining them.

This feature originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano