Lone male wins Menuhin Competition
mainThe only male in the last 22 contestants has won the 2016 London contest.
Ziyu He from China is 16 years old.
1st Prize Winner – Ziyu He, 16, China
2nd Prize Winner – SongHa Choi, 16, South Korea
3rd Prize Winner – Yu-Ting Chen, 20, Taiwan
4th Prize Winner – Jeein Kim, 20, South Korea
The jury of nine was chaired by American violinist Pamela Frank; with five former laureates Julia Fischer, Ray Chen, Tasmin Little, Ning Feng and Joji Hattori. Menuhin’s son and pianist Jeremy Menuhin, Korean violinistDong-Suk Kang and director of the Verbier Festival Martin Engstroem.
Ziyu He was born in Qingdao, China and began the violin aged 5 with Professor Xiangrong Zhang. Since 2011 he has studied at the University Mozarteum and Leopord Mozart Institute, under the tutelage of Professor Paul Roczek for violin, and since 2014 viola with Professor Thomas Riebl. He won the 2014 Eurovision Young Musicians.
Shame. The prize should have gone to a woman.
Yes. The caliber of performance is irrelevant. Eddie is right. It should have gone to a woman because anything other than that is proof of misogyny and patriarchy and muh oppression. Uh-huh….
And in the meantime-we should also be firing most current school teachers. Because 87% of them are women and we need equality. Oh. Wait. People like Eddie never agitate for that. Naturally.
If you have heard the performance, you would have known that Ziyu deserves the 1st prize. At the same time I am very happy that females are not underrepresented in this contest.
Some years ago in the final of the BBC Young Musician final four of the finalists were female and the lone male won. When the result was announced the male presenter, Charles Hazlewood, made a face and pointed out this fact. This was only in jest, of course, but it is still indicative of the attitude that if the women beat the men, it just shows there superiority, but if a lone man beats the women, there might be something dodgy about it.