Tony Zhou clinches top awards

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AFTER ranking as a runner-up three times in past years, pianist Tony Zhou has clinched the title of best senior instrumentalist in the 94th annual Winnipeg Music Festival.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/03/2012 (5293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AFTER ranking as a runner-up three times in past years, pianist Tony Zhou has clinched the title of best senior instrumentalist in the 94th annual Winnipeg Music Festival.

Zhou, 18, won the Aikins Memorial Trophy and the Ann Lugsdin Memorial Bursary with his performance of a Franz Liszt piece on Saturday at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He beat 15 other top players.

The Grade 12 student at Fort Richmond Collegiate said the bursary was especially meaningful because Lugsdin, who died in 2005, was his piano teacher as a child.

“I think it’s really special, because she made me interested in music,” said Zhou, who started studying with Lugsdin when he was four years old. “She was more than a music teacher. She was like a grandmother.”

The Richmond West resident now studies under David Moroz.

Zhou’s only sibling, Nina, won the Aikins in 2003. Now 25, she is a doctoral student in piano at the Jacobs School of Music in Indiana.

Zhou has auditioned for Jacobs and three other prestigious conservatories, including the Juilliard School in New York and the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. He is waiting to hear where he’s accepted for next year.

This academic year, the high-achieving Zhou decided to focus on the piano. So he gave up playing on his school’s varsity basketball team and competing in the science fair, which took him all the way to an international science fair in Australia two years ago.

The runners-up for the 2012 Aikins trophy were flutist Lynn Hornby and classical guitarists James Graham and Alan Nagelberg.

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