Saehyun Kim | Credit: Corentin Schimel / Fondation Long-Thibaud

Founded in Paris in the unlikely year 1943 by Marguérite Long and Jacques Thibaud, the absolute caryatids of French music-making, the Long-Thibaud Competition celebrates the universality of music as a force for good – which makes more sense of the date, with Paris under the Occupation.Violin and piano alternate by year, with 2025 the turn of the piano, and the grand final took place late in March in the charming horse-shoe Opéra-Comique, an acoustic more used to the frou-frou of Offenbach and slightly stretched by the full forces of the gleamingly meticulous Orchestre de la Garde Républicaine. The post-Covid president of the Foundation, Gérard Bekerman, opened proceedings on the final day with a moving tribute to the undiminished aptness of such a sentiment of universality in our times. There followed five finalists each with their concerto and, after a supper break – this is Paris! – the announcements, a repeat performance by the winner, and some bonnes bouches from some of the others.

All five finalists were of Asian origin and this year, by chance, each had chosen a different concerto from the list offered them – last time I think we had three Tchaikovsky firsts, this year, none. Winner of the first prize and a couple of the others, including the Audience and Press Prizes, was 17-year oldSaehyun Kim, with a bulldozing almost cataclysmic delivery of Rachmaninov’s Third. Alumnus of the Lang Lang Foundation and winner already of the Junior Cliburn Competition, this was a pure and effective example of jury-blasting pianism. Thereupon the jury, including Mikail Rudy, François-René Duchable, Marc Laforêt and others, did not award a second prize, but gave Hyo Lee – brother of recent winner Hyuk Lee – third place with an engaged and alert Prokofiev Third, both lyrical and muscular; not for nothing did he win the prize awarded by the orchestra. Fourth prize was shared ex æquo, a characteristic gesture we associate with Gérard Bekerman, between Tiankun Ma (Beethoven’s Fourth) and Masaharu Kambara (Brahms’s First), with Eric Guo bringing up the rear with a fetching, idiomatic but self-effacing Chopin Second.

The usual injustices were of course present. Ma’s slow movement achieved a fine level of maturity and reflection, maybe the high point of the day, while the carefully structured dynamism of Kambara’s Brahms was rather more alarmingly exciting than the winner’s unrelenting aggression. Lee took the Liberace palm for the swooning torso and star-gazing balletics which possibly, in the end, distracted from what was overall the most attractively responsive and communicative playing. The winner will play on 14 July at the Eiffel Tour to an audience in the hundreds of thousands, and they all share a variety of engagements such as at Aix-en-Provence, Gstaad, Versailles, Fondation Cziffra at Senlis, Le Touquet, Monte Carlo and so on.

The finals’ day can be seen in full on YouTube or via the home page of the Foundation’s website at www.long-thibaud.org.

Fiddlers will wish to note that the violin manifestation of the competition happens on 14th November 2026 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.