2 Utah piano teams win Bachauer honors

The first Gina Bachauer International Piano Teams Competition in seven years ended Saturday in Libby Gardner Concert Hall with teams from Arizona and Utah walking away with the top three prizes.

The first prize of $4,000 went to the Hansen Piano Team from Provo. Dancing Phoenix, based in Phoenix, took home the $3,000 second prize. Garnering third place, and the $2,000 prize money that goes with it, was Synergy from Provo-Orem.

There also was a Music Lover's Special Prize of $500, donated by an anonymous member of Saturday's audience. That was awarded to the Five-Pointed Stars from Phoenix.

The Hansen Piano Team is made up of Brigham Young University students Jonathan Bowman, Kurt Hansen, Michael McQuay and siblings Kalotini Latu and Mafile'o Latu. They are piano performance majors studying with Scott Holden and Irene Peery-Fox.

Synergy has two sets of siblings. The group's members are Aaron Inouye, Seidi Inouye, Jana-Leigh Weiss, Jessica Weiss and Jonathan Wanamaker. They are between the ages of 13 and 18.

Dancing Phoenix consists of Shin Chang, 15, Jocelyn Hu, 12, Jonathan Hu, 14, and Iris Lee, 13, and their teacher, Teh-ling Chiang.

Chiang also is a member of the Five-Pointed Stars, along with four of her other students — Ian-Joe Chang, 8, Rachel Ganger, 9, Jessica Liu, 8, and Maggie Wong, 8. Besides winning the special prize, the team also has the distinction of being the youngest group in the competition.

Teams competition is a rather new concept in instrumental competition. Developed by pianist and pedagogue Jane Tan, teams consist of five performers at five pianos — for this competition, four Steinways and a Bsendorfer.

Five-piano repertoire is fairly small, with only slightly more than 60 works in the catalogue. Most of these are transcriptions of orchestral music, and the vast majority of this repertoire has been transcribed by Tan.

The final round Saturday was brief, lasting only a little more than an hour. Unlike individual competition, in which performers are required to play anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per round, the teams competition only required one piece during the first round, two for the second round and one for the finals.