The Van Cliburn Legacy Is Passed to Nobuyuki Tsujii

As I listened to Van Cliburn play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata this morning, I was compelled to track down Nobuyuki Tsujii, the young Japanese pianist who, along with Haochen Zhang, was awarded the Gold Medal in the thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Van Cliburn could have rested on his laurels after his victory in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 along with the brutal travel schedule he kept for the next two decades. Instead, not only encourages the piano world's best and brightest young performers to hone their skills and compete on the world stage, he also offers music lovers in his adopted home town of Dallas the opportunity to hear world-class performers such as Yo Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Joshua Bell, and music by composers such as Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, and Lowell Liebermann. Below is one of Nobuyuki Tsujii's performances from the 2009 competition. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLBmBdLw4Yw