By Steve Sucato

In a region teeming with world-class classical music offerings from The Cleveland Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, and many more, the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Young Scholars Summit performances may be one of the region’s finest classical music offerings you’ve yet to hear of.

In partnership with the Lang Lang International Music Foundation’s Young Scholars Program, the summit, in only its second year, welcomed eighteen of the world’s finest young pianists, on three-year Lang Lang Foundation scholarships to Cleveland and the campus of CIM, from June 8-13, 2025, for a week of masterclasses, community outreach education sessions and concert recitals. 

Begun in 2008, superstar pianist Lang Lang’s Young Scholars Program offers a limited number of three-year scholarships to exceptionally talented young pianists ages 16 and younger from around the globe. These scholarships include mentoring, tutelage, and unique opportunities for performance in the United States, Europe, and China. The Foundation’s current group of scholarship students was chosen from a pool of over 450 student pianists. 

“The biggest goal is to develop the students as artists and human beings,” says Lang Lang International Music Foundation CEO, Leszek “Lucas” Barwiński-Brown. “We are not competing with the students’ other professors and schools. As you know, all of them are going to top programs at home, including The Juilliard School, the Royal College of Music, and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. 

Beyond learning scores and striving for technical perfection, Barwiński-Brown says he wants the foundation to expose its scholarship students to the history and culture of classical music. 

“Piano can be a very isolating and sometimes lonely instrument,” says Barwiński-Brown. “We also want to encourage socialization between the students and a sense of camaraderie.”

That camaraderie extends to their interactions with Lang Lang himself. Recently, says Barwiński-Brown, the foundation brought the young scholars to China and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where they attended masterclasses with the chart-topping, award-winning pianist, took in one of his public concerts, and had their own concert recital on the Great Wall of China. 

CIM’s relationship with the Lang Lang International Music Foundation was recently cemented by becoming the first educational institution to commit to an annual summer study program in conjunction with the privately funded foundation. Says Barwiński-Brown, going forward, CIM’s Young Scholars Summit will rotate its focus each year, shifting from the past two years, which concentrated on solo and group piano performance to next year having Lang Lang scholarship students working and performing alongside CIM Chamber Music program students, and the following year doing the same with the CIM Orchestra.

“This is exactly what our students’ education is supposed to be,” says Barwiński-Brown. “Their scholarships begin with them learning and playing piano solos and will now culminate with them learning and playing with an orchestra.” 

Last week’s summit had its eighteen students (including a few whose scholarship experience was shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic), aged 13 -16, from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and China, participating in five masterclasses taught by CIM Piano Department faculty that were open to the public, and performing in three Rising Stars Recitals. The free-to-the-public recitals began on Sunday, June 8, at Steinway Piano Gallery Cleveland and featured solo repertoire by Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and others. The second event took place the following evening at CIM’s Mixon Hall and included solo repertoire by Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Stravinsky, and others. 

The final recital of the Young Scholars Summit was held on Friday evening, June 13, at Mixon Hall. Aptly billed as an “Extravaganza Performance.” It featured a dozen of the Lang Lang students performing with CIM faculty members Ilya Itin, a gold medalist at the 1996 Leeds International Piano Competition; Daria Robotkina, winner of the 2007 Concert Artists Guild International Competition; and Piano Department head Antonio Pompa-Baldi, who won the 1999 Cleveland International Piano Competition and earned a silver medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition.

The performance, in the majestic wooden-walled Mixon Hall, with its picturesque stage backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows revealing the outside trees and foliage, showcased compositions by Maurice Ravel, Gioachino Rossini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and John Philip Sousa, among others, played on one or two pianos with four to eight hands.
 
While all of the ten or so piano works on the program were played brilliantly and with flair by the students and CIM faculty, each with the pianists appearing to use their entire bodies to execute keystrokes, a handful of performances stood out for their energy, intensity, passion, and bravura playing. They included Pompa-Baldi and student Yau Nam Ng’s finger-flying, head-bobbing rendition of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture Finale” for one piano and four hands arranged by Louis Moreau Gottschalk; Robotkina performing with students Aidan Zhao, Xinran Shi, and Sophia Suwiryo in Charles Gounod’s audience-pleasing “Waltz from Faust” for two pianos and eight hands arranged by Renauld de Vilback; and students Peter Parra, Olivia Larco, Raditya Muljadi, and Xinran Shi performing a rapid-fire rendition of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” for two pianos and eight hands arranged by Mack Wilberg.

As great as all the aforementioned were, one gem stood above the rest. Pompa-Baldi and Itin, along with students Ryan Huang and Sencheng Zhang’s playing of Franz Liszt’s “Les Préludes,” was inspired. Blurring any distinctions between student and non-student performers, the quartet delivered the work for two pianos and eight hands with rousing drama and angelic grace.

Beyond being stellar piano concerts, the “Extravaganza Performance,” along with the others earlier in the week, were also golden opportunities for area classical music aficionados and casual fans alike to be introduced to some of classical music’s brightest future stars. 

“I am very proud of all of our Young Scholars Program students,” says Barwiński-Brown. “Some of our alumni have gone on to win piano competitions and have played concerts with major orchestras from around the world. I wish for all of the students here this week to have enormous careers.”