2025 Terrace Hill Piano Competition

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Terrace Hill, a treasured national historic landmark and the Governor's residence, overlooking Iowa's capital city. The first floor has long been a gathering place for entertaining visitors. And some of the best piano students in the state recently assembled here to share their talents and skills in an annual contest. This is the Terrace Hill Piano Competition.

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Funding provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation, as well as generations of family and friends who feel passionate about the programs they watch on Iowa PBS.

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[Travis Graven] Hello, I'm Travis Graven and welcome to the 2025 Terrace Hill Piano Competition, held for the very first time right here at beautiful, historic Terrace Hill. For nearly 40 years, the Terrace Hill Endowment for the Musical Arts has sponsored this competition to showcase some of Iowa's finest young musicians. And, over the next hour, we will highlight performances from our top finishers in both the junior and senior divisions. Enjoy.

 

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[Dr. Mark Stevens] When we go hear live music, we never walk out of a concert thinking, oh my goodness, they played all the notes right. So, that's sort of to be expected. And students at this level who participate in a competition like this, they already play at an extremely high level. So, what I'm looking for is for them to communicate something through the music, to move me in some way, to be expressive. When we study music, we take a fairly rudimentary set of instructions from the score, the notes, the dots, things like that, and we have to take from that a composer's vision. So, I'm listening for a student who can play in a way that shows me they know what the composer is supposed to sound like. The style of Beethoven, for example, is very different than the style of Chopin or Debussy. But beyond that, I'm listening for students who are connected to what they are doing, who are in the music, who feel like they have something to say, some sort of expression, I suppose, so that they do something with those dots on the page.

[Travis Graven] Third place Minerva Cao of Clive.

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[Travis Graven] Second place Gwenyth Franzcyk from Urbandale.

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[Travis Graven] First place goes to Gideon Levine from Iowa City.

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[Gideon Levine] I am Gideon Levine. I am from Iowa City, Iowa. And I've been playing piano for about ten years.

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[Gideon Levine] The feeling of really feeling like you've mastered a piece or getting to a point where you can perform it for people and feel satisfied with it is a feeling that I don't get from anything else. And because this music I'm so in love with it, I listen to it all the time and I practice it all the time, and when I perform it to a level that I'm proud of it's a fantastic experience. The place where I've grown up, classical piano is not a very popular sort of genre of music, let alone a thing that many people do. And I have a lot of friends who I think they know I'm a pianist, but they don't really know what it is. So, when I perform or I post videos of myself playing, I think for me it's a chance to show people what this is and what it means to me because I think I express it very well as I play. So, I think that is the most valuable thing to me is to show people how great it is and to show them maybe something they have never heard before, they didn't know piano music was like.

 

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[Travis Graven] Third place Veronica Smith of Des Moines.

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[Travis Graven] Second place Gretchen Mizerak of Ames.

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[Travis Graven] And first place Helen Mao of Ames.

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[Helen Mao] My name is Helen Mao. I am currently 17 years old and I was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. And I've been playing piano since I was like three or four. And you just have to think of it as a performance opportunity. Try not to be nervous. I could still feel my heart beating really fast during the actual thing. But I think it's just a good way to let your emotions out, like to show all of the hard work that you've been doing and then just try to have people feel different feelings from what you're playing. I just like showing all of my hard work to everyone. I've done all of this and I want you guys to be able to feel either happiness, feel nostalgic, different memories from it. I just want the audience to feel impacted by what I'm playing because I learned how to use my voice from my teachers better through music playing and I want my playing to also help influence others to also use their voice. So, I also want to teach in the future. So, if I can just use my voice to help others use their voice, whether I'm competing or playing or teaching, I think that's beautiful and that's what I want.

 

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Funding provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation as well as generations of family and friends who feel passionate about the programs they watch on Iowa PBS.

 

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