Tickets are now available for the Gilmore Piano Festival's Rising Stars series, and executive director Pierre van der Westhuizen and Cara Lieurance introduce the five young pianists making their way to Kalamazoo this fall. Now in its 26th year, the series has previously helped launch the careers of artists like Lang Lang and Igor Levit.
Van der Westhuizen describes a scouting process that blends a global network of colleagues with late-night research. "I, usually every night, do a rabbit hole deep dive down YouTube by myself and listen to lots of recordings," he says, adding that view counts alone don't impress him: when agents tout a pianist's online numbers, his response is simply, "great, but are they any good?"
The season opens September 20 with 17-year-old Canadian pianist Sophia Liu, first heard by van der Westhuizen at a festival in Provence, France when she was 14. Her program features works by Charles-Valentin Alkan, Balakirev, and Tchaikovsky. October 3 brings Dabin Ryu, the Seoul-born, New York-based winner of the jazz division of South Africa's UNISA International Piano Competition, to Bell's Eccentric Café. Hong Kong pianist Aristo Sham, gold medalist at the 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, performs Beethoven, Rachmaninov, and Chopin on October 18.
November 15 features Tel Aviv's Tom Borrow, who famously stepped in with 36 hours' notice to replace an ailing soloist with the Israel Philharmonic in 2019 — a break van der Westhuizen compares to Yuja Wang's own career-making moment. He recalls advice pianist Murray Perahia once gave festival fellows: "Always say yes." The series closes December 5 with jazz pianist Caelan Cardello, a past winner of the BMI Future Jazz Master Award, also at Bell's.
Tickets for all individual five concerts are available now at thegilmore.org.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
