Heida Hermanns Piano Competition Winners

The finals round of the 2015 Heida Hermanns International Music Competition, this year featuring piano, was held today at First Church Fairfield in Fairfield. Winner of the $5,000 first prize was Wenjie Lu (r), a native of China who began playing piano at age 5. He is a student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. The two-day competition was presented by the Connecticut Alliance for Music (CAM) with the support of the Westport Arts Center. Others pictured: (l-r) .Barry Persky, president of CAM; Soyoung Kim, Ye-Eun Kwag, Hsin-Chao Liao, all honorable mention; Gvantas Zangaladze, third place, and Vladimir Rumyanivtsev, second place. The competition is named after Heida Hermanns, a world-class concert pianist and child prodigy who fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled with her husband in Westport. She died in 1995 at age 89. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Phyllis Groner for WestportNow.com