Seventeen-year-old Conrad Tao and fifteen-year-old George Li have been named recipients of the 2012 Gilmore Young Artist Award for promising U.S. pianists age 22 and younger. Tao and Li—among the youngest recipients to have received the award—each will receive $15,000 to further their musical and educational career, as well as a $10,000 commission for a new piano work to be composed for them. Tao, a native of Urbana, Illinois, recently graduated from the Preparatory Division of the Juilliard School and will enter the Columbia University/Juilliard combined-degree program in New York this September. Li, a first-prize winner of the 2010 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the inaugural Cooper International Piano Competition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2010, attends the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Massachusetts and studies at the New England Conservatory Preparatory Division with Wha Kyung Byun. The Gilmore Young Artist Awards, established in 1989, are the legacy of Irving S. Gilmore, a Kalamazoo businessman and philanthropist. Previous winners include Jonathan Biss, Kirill Gerstein, Yuja Wang, Adam Golka, Orli Shaham, Orion Weiss, and Christopher Taylor.
Posted June 27, 2011
