A New Kind of Piano Competition

Do piano competitions offer a good, fair, and attractive basis for a complete pianist and musician? In today’s scene, many competition organizers have started including additional elements for judging with a focus on preparing the competitor for a real, multifaceted musical life that reaches beyond prize money and temporary fame. Ralf Gothóni, the creator of a new kind of piano competition in Shanghai, shares his insights with us.

The Shanghai International Musician Competition, a collaboration between the Shanghai Conservatory and Savonlinna Music Academy, is a groundbreaking event. Held in Savonlinna (August 20-24, 2025, video round) and Shanghai (October 28-November 12, 2025), it challenges pianists (born 2010 or earlier) to demonstrate versatility as soloists, chamber musicians, and Lieder pianists. Contestants will also rehearse, perform, and conduct a Mozart concerto and a compulsory Chinese composition from the keyboard.
Ralf Gothóni, Chairman of the Jury and Initiator of the competition stresses the importance of versatility for today’s musicians, the magic of collaboration, and how music connects us to something deeper.

The collaboration between the Shanghai Conservatory and the Savonlinna Music Academy, with its history of opera exchanges and music festivals, has culminated in this groundbreaking competition.

Piano Street: Dear Ralf. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. You’ve had a remarkable career spanning solo performance, chamber music, conducting, and even artistic direction of major festivals. Looking back, is there one particular area or project that you find most fulfilling or that had the most profound impact on your musical development, and why?

Photo: Usva Torkki

Ralf Gothóni: If we are interested in digging in the phenomenology of music and life we are living like an octopus in a dimension where we can explore the essence of things with all our tentacles. Everything affects everything – also in music. Practicing an instrument develops control which speeds up the physical and mental abilities, which gives free space for the fantasy, which develops creativity – which is needed again to practice at a new level.
I learned almost nothing important in the schools. Much more from older, already well known musical partners and from some great personalities like Ervin Laszlo and Max Martin Stein, which showed the path to follow. Literature and the arts gave a lot of inspiration as well as early observations about the similarity of musical sensations with the endless changing flow and wave motions of water, the gravitation with speeding and inhibiting characters, perception of importance of the timing and entropy of the energy. I was inspired to continue searching and finding connections with music and for example: quantum mechanics or the sexual life of ants… This kind of connections can create a strong ground for a holistic view of life.

PS: This “new-grip competition” emphasises versatility, requiring pianists to excel in solo performance, chamber music, Lieder pianism, and conducting. How do you believe these diverse skill sets contribute to a more well-rounded and complete musician in today’s world?

RG: All these pianistic activities require different qualities; virtuosity is required everywhere as we can nowadays hear with miraculous psychophysical performances, in chamber music we need the ability to communicate consciously with sounds and time, Lied opens the access to learn to “speak with the tones” through the synthesis of poetry and music, and conducting teaches us to be a creative element in a large wholeness, reacting to everything.
Professionally speaking, versatility is essential for most musicians. When talent is combined with personality and musicality, a musical life is achievable even without competition. So many important festivals have musicians as artistic directors who usually create a family of able musicians to work even for years with each other. A complete musician means the ability to live a musical life.

PS: From performing lieder with some of the world’s greatest singers to conducting renowned orchestras, you’ve collaborated with a vast array of musicians. What do you value most in a musical partnership, and how do you approach the dynamic of creating music with others, whether as a pianist, conductor, or chamber musician?

RG: I started with piano at 5 and my first music book was only for the right hand, second book only for the left and the third book for both hands. So that was already the beginning of chamber music for two hands! Chamber music became the natural way to communicate with the partners – to understand and to be understood. This happens through and with the sounds from our emotional-intellectual wholeness. The same happens also with Lieder as chamber music with the difference that the synthesis of text and music, awareness and subconsciousness gives another kind of deep view of reasons and reactions. Knowledge of literature, arts and history are very much needed to give the singer and pianist the landscape where they will be connected.
We have learned that music is maybe the most communicative language, with an endless amount of “words” and feelings. But we avoid making square, stiff decisions of interpretation and that’s why many great musicians do not like to rehearse more than the absolute needful. The mind has to stay free of “owning interpretations” and open for the telepathy in the right moments.

PS: The competition’s organizers highlight the aim to recognize individuals who “can navigate life’s spiritual challenges through music.” How do you interpret this statement, and how do you see the connection between musical artistry and personal resilience or spiritual growth?

RG: Einstein is told to have said: “I want to understand how the world was created. Its manifestations do not interest me”. Sound is a wave. Scientifically it provides no information other than pitch, loudness, and length. A melody on a computer screen only presents a two-dimensional image of waves, which visualise polyphonic sounds or a jumble, but no deeper, understandable information.
But in music we know that the vibrations are transporting information about us, vibrating beings. We know that everything, materia with its smallest particle and spirit with strongest enthusiasm, vibrates with enormous differences. We also know that the musical vibrations communicate with inner experiences in our own life. That’s why our spirit reflects itself, affecting among other things our health, our thinking and emotions. Perhaps one of musicians’ lifetime tasks is to develop and to carry out our personal vibrations through the ages, mystically, without knowing why and to where…
Music belongs to everybody. There are hardly any unmusical persons who would not be able to say something about the informative difference between a major and a minor triad. That is the beginning of the ability to perceive differences and values. So we all have started already in the womb.

PS: What do you see as the significance of this ongoing cultural exchange between Finland and China, and how does it contribute to the broader landscape of classical music?

RG: We know that the western classical music has had an incredible evolution in Asia, not least in China. It is spoken about tenths of millions of piano students. Savonlinna has about 40.000 inhabitants with a small Summer Music Academy, The Conservatory in Shanghai is huge with a very high level of all instrumental students, singers and also chamber music. Our collaboration is not about who is big or beautiful – it is a question of two very different cultures making a dialog, with completely different history. But we have happily noticed we need each other’s. This is a cultural and political miracle.
But there is more – the content, in which we have the same desire – to meet and understand the path of humanity – listening, reacting, helping, inspiring, giving impulses. The goal is clear. With music it is possible to understand more about our existence, its beauty, fragility and challenges.
If all political important conferences would start with a performance of a late Beethoven string quartet, the discussions would have as result a different world. I have been organising many Musical Bridges between Finland and Arab countries as “homeopathic work for peace with musical pills”. I remember how in Cairo around 2010 four students, one fundamental and one modern muslim, one coptic and one catholic, played string quartet without any problem. They had the same score and the will to communicate with their best understanding…

PS: Given the competition’s focus on holistic musicianship and its aim to identify those ready for an international career, what advice would you give to aspiring pianists considering participating, and what qualities beyond technical proficiency do you believe are essential for success in this field?

RG: Two things: every musician knows that to understand the motivation of playing after the “easy” first tone the second one needs from us our full musicality and capacity. To bring this understanding to direct our life will help us in developing ourselves with all our joys and sorrows. Because we are informants and what we are giving should have importance and should transport values.
The other thing is easy to understand; how difficult it is to live as a classical musician in our daily world of noises and disturbances. There are thousands of prize winners every year in competitions, and most of them are waiting to see an open door to great success in the world, where tens of thousands are asking for concerts, applying in queues for positions in orchestras or universities. Pianists do not have orchestras. That’s why it is most important to learn to use all abilities which we can develop in ourselves. This is the opening door leading to an evolving musical life. The Shanghai Musician Competition is an attempt to share awareness of these possibilities.

Read more at the competition’s website:
www.shanghaimusiciancompetition.com