What did winning the Van Cliburn competition mean to you?  I'd like to experience it a second time. There's such enormous pressure on all of the competitors. Before the final announcement of the winners, we were so exhausted that everyone was just happy it was finished. When they called my name, at first I did not feel anything. Maybe som...

When David Tong was seven, a week before he was scheduled to make his professional debut as a pianist, a boy took his basketball during gym class and refused to return it. David regularly got into fights at school, often over nothing more than a stolen pencil; a stolen basketball was flagrant provocation. The pair started shoving and scuf...

Eight years ago, someone in Tel Aviv slid a letter under the hotel room door of Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky. A professor in the piano department at Juilliard, Kaplinsky was in Tel Aviv as a juror for the Rubinstein International Piano Competition. The other jurors received the same letter. When she opened the envelope, she was horrified. The letter attac...