The votes are in

The judges' votes are in, and Ching-Yun Hu is the winner of the gold medal at the 51st World Piano Competition in the finals held Saturday at the Aronoff Center.
Hu, 25, a native of Taipei, Taiwan, will receive a Lincoln Center recital valued at $35,000 and a cash prize of $10,000.

Christopher Atzinger, 30, a native of Jackson, Mich., won the silver medal, and $5,000. Russian pianist Yuri Shadrin, 26 won the bronze medal and $3,000 cash prize.

Hu won the gold with a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in a performance conducted by Neal Gittleman, who is in his 12th season as music director of the Dayton Philharmonic.

Hu is a rising star pianist who has performed extensively throughout the world as a Yamaha Artist. This season, she made her Lincoln Center debut in Alice Tully Hall and performed at the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Juilliard School, where she studied with Oxana Yablonskaya and Herbert Stessin, she now studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The Artist Division of the competition attracted 20 contestants, ages 18 to 30, who began competing on July 2. The field was winnowed to seven in the semifinals, held Thursday.

Other winners included Russian pianist Ilya Kazantsev, 23, who came in fourth and won $1,000. Fifth place and $500 went to Oleksandr Poliykov, 29, of Ukraine. Chinese pianist Rui Shi, 24, and New Zealand pianist Henry Wong Doe, 30, tied for sixth place and $150 each.

The judges were Larissa Dedova of Russia; Swan Kwon of South Korea; Minoru Miura of Japan; Robert Ruckman, chair of Sinclair Community College’s music department in Dayton and Robert Thomas, professor of piano and head of the keyboard division at Miami University, Oxford. Fox19's Jack Atherton hosted the event.

I'm still trying to figure out why their Web site lists the Third Place winner first. Hmmm.

For info, visit www.cincinnatiwpc.org.