$25 ($20 senior/student)
The culmination of an intensive annual competition, Concerto Division Winners of the Seattle Young Artists Music Festival Association (SYAMFA) will perform concerti by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Bartók in a stellar event accompanied by Philharmonia Northwest, conducted by Julia
Tai. With generous support from Northwest Pianos, this year's piano soloists are grateful to perform on a 9 ft Fazioli F278. Audience members should prepare to be astonished by the adult level performances they will hear!
Walk through any piano showroom today and ask the staff what's bringing new customers through the door. The answer, with surprising frequency, is a name — Yunchan Lim — or a platform — TikTok. The viral explosion of classical piano performance on short-form video is not a marketing campaign dreamed up by record labels or conservatories. It is an organic, viewer-driven phenomenon that is reshaping who listens to classical music, who buys pianos, and what they want to play when they get home.
Piano manufacturing is, by its nature, a materials-intensive craft. A modern grand piano contains roughly 12,000 individual components. It requires carefully selected hardwoods — spruce, maple, beech, walnut — sourced from forests in multiple countries. It uses felt, leather, metal alloys, and chemical finishes. Building one well takes skilled labor spanning months.
In January 2026, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas included something that would have seemed out of place a decade ago: a piano technology exhibit generating genuine buzz alongside the televisions, smartphones, and AI gadgets that dominate the show floor. The products on display — connected instruments, app-integrated learning systems, multi-device MIDI setups — weren't novelties. They were the direction the piano industry is heading.
