The extraordinary talent of a nine-year-old girl from Brno has led her to the highest level of winners in a piano competition

CZECH REPUBLIC - Only nine-year-old Sandrine Petrova from Brno won this year's 32nd edition of the Amadeus International Mozart Piano Competition in Brno, which is open to children up to 15 years of age. The task of the competitors, who this year numbered 87 from ten countries, is to play a selected Mozart piece. The best of the best performed at a concert at the Besední dům today. According to the judges, some of the children are already much further along than their peers at this early age, said Klára Hrivňáková from the organising ZUŠ Veveří.

According to the judge Petr Toperczer, who has been attending the competition for 20 years, Brno is mostly home to exceptional children. Amadeus is a demanding competition not only technically, but especially in terms of its narrow style. „The classical music performance competition is unique even in a global context,“ Toperczer said. His colleague Daniel Buranovsky added that playing the piano is not only a question of talent, but also of above-average intelligence. „A child has to manage several layers of music at the same time, coordinate both hands, work with imagination and emotion. Playing the piano is a demanding activity for the brain. So it's not uncommon to see kids with IQs of around 130 and up,“ Buranovsky said.

Petrova impressed the jury with her overall speech and unusually mature tone culture. „Some people play the piano like a hammered instrument, yet children at this age are already able to model tone beautifully and cultivate relationships between individual notes. They have imaginations and the music fills them emotionally as well, and I admired that immensely,“ Buranovsky said. However, without her extraordinary diligence and family background, Toperczer said she would not have succeeded. She has been successful in other piano competitions in the past. The naturalness of her playing, he said, is in tune with the Mozart world. As a reward, she was offered a joint concert with the Brno Philharmonic.

An interesting feature of the competition is that more than one member of the same family goes through it; one Slovak-Japanese family even sent all five daughters to the competition this year. Many of the previous winners have gone on to solo careers in music, and some of them are already world-class pianists. For example, Lukáš Vondráček or Terezie Fialová are well known beyond the borders of the Czech Republic.

metro.cz/gnews.cz-jav