Why it matters. Sun-yul represents a wave of young Korean classical musicians winning top international prizes, and her candor about stage fright offers a rare, human counterpoint to the usual narrative of effortless success.
Background. South Korea has become a powerhouse in international classical competitions over the past decade, with pianists like Cho Seong-jin and Lim Yunchan winning global acclaim. The Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts) is the country's premier state conservatory, and the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a respected American contest whose winners traditionally perform at venues like Carnegie Hall.
What to watch next. Sun-yul performs at Carnegie Hall in October as a Bachauer laureate and plans to enter further competitions despite her recent wins.
A winner who refuses to ‘graduate’
South Korean pianist Sun-yul, 25, has won major international competitions yet still plans to keep entering more, telling the daily newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun in a Seoul interview on May 5 that the stage is where she learns “not to surrender to fear.” Most laureates treat a big win as a graduation from the competition circuit; Sun-yul is deliberately doing the opposite.
Her recent record is the kind that usually closes that chapter. In 2024 she won the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in the United States, the prize that put her name on the map, and took first place the same year at the Seoul International Music Competition. This past March she placed second at the Ljubljana Festival Piano Competition in Slovenia. Earlier this year she was named a resident musician of the Mapo Foundation for Arts and Culture in Seoul, and in October she will perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall as a Bachauer winner. Even so, she intends to compete again.
Why keep competing?
Asked why, Sun-yul said competitions are “still a stage I need.” The pressure is real, she acknowledged, but each contest offers large-stage experience, a chance to play for an audience, and the company of peers. “Hearing how differently other players interpret the same piece is an incredible lesson, and it’s fun,” she said. Because each competition sets slightly different required repertoire, the entries also push her to widen the music she can play.
That answer might suggest a fierce competitor who thrives on adrenaline. The reality, as she described it, is the reverse. Stage fright has dogged her throughout her career. There are moments at the piano when the occasion feels so heavy she simply wants to walk off, and the few seconds spent bowing to the audience and approaching the keyboard still unsettle her.
She once tried to quit altogether, while studying at the Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts), Seoul’s leading conservatory, when she had lost confidence and any sense of her future. She traveled to a friend’s home in the southern port city of Busan to clear her head, but returned after just three days — unable to bear the urge to play the piano she had left untouched.
Paris, and learning to let go
Studying in France reshaped that relationship. A teacher she met in Paris in 2022 told her not to practice more than three hours a day — strange advice for someone who felt safe only when seated at the instrument for long stretches. Over time she understood it not as a demand to practice less but as permission to fill her inner life. Watching the museums, streets and varied faces of Paris led her to a conviction that “just as there is no single right answer in life, there is none in music either.” “I used to hesitate, wondering whether I was even allowed to play this way,” she said. “Seeing people express their own variety, I began to show my own thoughts and feelings.”
That outlook runs through her programming. At a recital on May 4 she performed Franz Liszt’s complete Transcendental Études, a cycle notorious for its technical and physical demands. Her aim, she said, was not to show how fast or how brilliantly she could play, but to convey to the audience how fine the music itself is. Her second-half recitals this year will feature Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 and a Chopin scherzo — works that once wounded her. She had loved them enough to program them for her graduation recital, only to be gripped by the crushing thought, “Is this all I am?” They became pieces she was afraid to face again.
For Sun-yul, both the competitions and the feared repertoire are choices made in order to keep playing. The two Kyunghyang reports frame her story slightly differently — one casts the running theme as “what a competition means” to her, the other foregrounds her own line about refusing to give in — but both land on the same idea. The stage, she says, is not a place to win. It is where she learns not to bow to fear.
