Choosing the winner at the 2025 International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition was not an easy business. The jury talked for five hours as they struggled to reach a decision and, when they finally re-entered the hall at 2am, were amazed to find the audience still in their seats waiting for the verdict.
That is how all-consuming this competition can become. Other piano competitions have come on to the scene since Poland’s flagship competition was inaugurated in 1927, but none has surpassed this one in esteem. Named in honour of the country’s most famous composer, it is only held once every five years, so winning it is a big deal.
The roll-call of past winners remains second to none. First-prize winners have included Bella Davidovich, Maurizio Pollini, Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimerman, Yundi Li and Seong-Jin Cho, while the second prize has heralded international careers like those of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mitsuko Uchida.
Why then was the 2025 competition so problematic? From a starting total of 171 competitors (63 of them, no less, from China), 84 went forward to the four stages of the main competition, a large number but not impossible. These days the standard of entrants is so high that there is often little separating them, but beyond that another, very specific concern faced the 17 jurors as they looked for unity on their choice.
The eventual winner was the American Eric Lu, then aged 27, and unusually he was by no means an unknown quantity. Lu had even taken part in the Chopin Competition before, when he came fourth back in 2015, and gone on to win the Leeds International Piano Competition, appearing with leading orchestras and landing a record contract with Warner Classics.
With the recent release of a new recital disc and a live selection of his 2025 Chopin Competition performances also having appeared, this seems a good moment to look back at why his success in Warsaw was both controversial and deserved.
A return to the competition by a pianist who had already achieved so much was clearly an issue, not least for Lu himself. Other competitors would be looking forward to some upside from taking part, but Lu could potentially have a lot to lose. At a press conference, he described that when he told friends he intended to enter, they responded on the lines of, “I wouldn’t do it myself”. His parents came back with an immediate “Oh, no, no!”.
It was only after his win that Lu felt free to talk about the punishing anxiety he had endured and how the desire to fulfil his potential at the Chopin competition still proved stronger. “I felt like I played for so many people at such a fragile age in my life when I wasn’t really ready to do it,” he said of 2015. “I felt that while my career was going well, it was not at the level that I have the ambitions for.”
For the jury, the issue was one of various competing priorities. The chair, Garrick Ohlsson, himself a former winner in 1970, kept finding himself “the onion in the petunia patch”, constantly at variance with the others in his markings. “I am not surprised that there was a great difference of opinion, but I didn’t know that it would become during discussions so totally blocked.”
Unable to reach a decision through discussion, the jury decided to revert to the results of their opening secret ballot — the fairest outcome to which all could sign up. “If the point of a competition is to discover a bright new talent, then this year wasn’t particularly exciting,” says John Allison, one of the jurors and editor of Opera magazine. “[But if it] is to give the highest number of marks to the best pianist, then we did absolutely fine”.
A live recital disc, made during the competition, was rush-released by DG, allowing us to come to our own judgments. Uniquely among piano competitions, the Chopin competition is dedicated solely to performances of its namesake’s music, and with his mix of elegance of sound, clarity of execution and technical ease, Lu has all the basic requirements for a first-class Chopin player.
The selection included on this disc ranges across the competition’s four rounds. The three Mazurkas, Op 56, achieve an intimacy that one might not expect in a large concert hall. The Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, Op 27 No 1, melds moonlit stillness to underlying passions, even if pianists such as Maria João Pires and Stephen Hough have shown how naturally the music sings at faster speeds. The exemplary performance of the Sonata No 2 in B Flat Minor bears out Allison’s judgment that Lu’s playing of the two mature Chopin’s sonatas were “interpretatively high points” of the competition.
The new release from Warner Classics takes him back to Schubert, this time for the Impromptus, following earlier recordings of two of Schubert’s piano sonatas and a disc of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms. This is less obviously a central recommendation, mainly because Lu allows himself a generous amount of time, each Impromptu clocking in significantly slower than they do with other major pianists.
That said, it would be hard to imagine the time better spent. The music floats on a heavenly cloud lit up from within with a radiance of sound, the essence of Schubertian lyricism. The most tuneful of the Impromptus, the G Flat Major, sings with the utmost sensitivity. Given how slow some passages are, it is impressive that Lu is able to fill the time with expressive touches and not lose momentum, ensuring that Schubert’s “heavenly lengths” (Schumann’s phrase) always know where they are going. These pieces are favourites of piano teachers and it would probably not be a good idea for students to copy Lu’s expansiveness. For everybody else, there is much beauty to be had.
‘Eric Lu: Winner of the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition’ is available on DG
‘Schubert: The Impromptus Opp. 90 & 142’ with Eric Lu is available on Warner Classics
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