A record-breaking medalist of the piano

When the Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang was awarded half of the gold medal at the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition (he shared top honors with Japanese virtuoso Nobuyuki Tsujii), he became both the first Chinese artist to win the award and, at 19, the youngest performer to do so.

Born in Shanghai, he began performing there at 5, and then came to the U.S. to study with the renowned performer and pedagogue Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

[...] his recital programs have included both standards of the Western repertoire and arrangements of traditional Chinese music.