Over the weekend, the Final Round of the 2022 Piano Star International Competition took place. Our esteemed panel of judges listened to 155 pianists from around the world who played LIVE on Zoom and gave verbal feedback immediately after their performance. We appreciate their hard work!
As always, here is a reminder from our judges about how they feel when they hear your performances:
PL Excellence of Teaching Awards
Behind every contestant is a hard-working teacher. We would like to recognize the following teachers whose student had a PL Star Score of 9.0 or above in either the Preliminary Round or the Final Round (in last-name alphabetical order):
Orn Pornphan Banternghansa
Donna Bender
San-Qing Lu Bennaman
Michael Berkovsky
Ilya Blinov
Hans Boepple
Jessica Caporizzo
Chih Yu Chen
Han Chen
Panyawut Choochuai
Karina Maucha Cohen
Ran Feng
Robin Freund-Epstein
Natsuki Fukasawa
Sutini GohMatthew Hagle
Marian Hahn
Jenni Halim
Kristina Henckel
Ikumi Hiraiwa
Timothy Hoft
Kookhee Hong
Li-Pi Hsieh
Rosalinawati Iman
Xiaoxiao Ji
Mihyang Joo
Yoheved Kaplinsky
Tatiana Kats
HyeJin Kim
Sherry Kim
Peyhwan Kuan
Julia Lam
Cindy Lee
Brian Yuebing Lin
Chiu-Tze Lin
Estelle Lin
Yiuka Little
Hanbo Liu
Alex Mcdonald
Christopher Janwong McKiggan
Sueanne Shimabuku Metz
Oxana Mikhailoff
Victoria Moiseyeva
Fidel Rodolfo Castro Montalván
Dmitri Nazarenko
Suvida Neramit-aram
Nobuyo Nishizaka
Bo, Pang
Hyun-Sook Park
Linda Parr
Cheng-Yen Peng
Nina Polonsky
Thawanhathai Rujichaitammakul
Kathleen Stephenson Sadoff
Lara Saldanha
Sally Sansbury
Sean Schulze
Tanya Schwartzman
Renata Shumskaya
Si Si
Jennifer Mihee Song
Yukimi Song
Jasmine Steadman
Mary Elizabeth Stephenson
I-shan Su
Ludovica Tassani
Lora Tchekoratova
Tatiana Tessman
Michael Thomopoulos
Jiaxin Tian
Yi-Fang Wu
Ariel Yang
Yiheng Yang
Qian Yin
Mikhail Zeiger
Raisa Zelenska
Qi Zhang
Cheng Zhong
Grand Finalists
The Grand Finals will be live-streamed on our Youtube and Facebook pages at the following times:
8 PM – 10 PM EST, Saturday, December 10th, 2022: Amateur A – E
1 PM – 3 PM EST, Sunday, December 11th, 2022: Professional I – III
A reminder of the rules: the Final Round PL Star Score is calculated based on the rounded-down average of the scores given by the three judges. To advance to the Grand Final round, one must be the top-4 scoring pianist in the Final Round in their respective groups. The PL Star Score does not go to the 100th decimal. However, for Grand Finalist ranking purposes, the 100th decimal will be used to determine tiebreakers. (For example, an average score of 9.57 and 9.53 will both get a PL Star Score of 9.5. However, the contestant with the 9.57 average score will win the tiebreaker if needed for Grand Finalist eligibility purposes.)
In addition, Final Round prizes are distributed as follows:
9.5 – 10.0: First Prize
9.0 – 9.4: Second Prize
8.5 – 8.9: Third Prize
8.4 or below: Finalist
The Piano Star International Competition prides itself on complete transparency and fairness. Per the Rules and Regulations, we are publishing all PL Star Scores from the Final Round from all judges. Specific instructions/metrics were given to the judges when scoring the contestants to ensure that the scores were within a similar range. In instances where a judge has a student competing, the judge was prohibited from giving a score to the contestant and was instructed to also verbally comment on their own students’ playing to not reveal to the other judges that the contestant is his/her student.
Here are our 2022 Grand Finalists:
