Élisabeth Pion: Capturing Honens Gold

Advertisement / Publicité

This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en: Français (French)

Twenty-nine-year-old pianist Élisabeth Pion, a Quebec native, won the coveted Gold Laureate prize at the 2025 Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary last October. Occurring every three to four years, the elite competition offers a lofty $100,000 cash prize and a three-year Artist Development Program valued at $500,000 for the lucky winner. Honens occupies a special place among the world’s “track and field” keyboard events. It searches for the elusive and undefinable “complete artist,” a term that applies only to the rarest of contestants, while dividing jury, critics and public alike on notions of taste, values, and esthetics.

Pion demonstrated her potential for this distinguished title from the onset of her Honens 2025 appearance. Her first-round programming sparkled with a flowing rendition of Chopin’s Etudes Op. 25 and her bold repertoire choices, including Polish-born Grażyna Bacewicz’s Sonata and her own composition inspired by Baudelaire’s notorious Fleurs du mal. A pair of sizzling red heels completed the impression that gave her an edge over other contestants: she has a personality.

The first woman to win the Honens since Katherine Chi in 2000, Pion follows a legacy that includes prizewinners such as Sergei Babayan, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, and, more recently, Nicolas Namoradze. In her introductory video, Pion remarked: “A complete artist is very serious in [her]aloneness and in protecting the time needed for introspection.” Few Honens pianists offered wiser thoughts. A tai-chi practitioner, Pion occasionally leads mindfulness sessions with various orchestras.

This may be the key to understanding the slight discordance between listening to her entire program live, and the eventual results of the competition. Pion is an intuitive virtuoso who synthesizes more than she analyzes, searches, experiments, or proclaims through her art. She is one of those smart contestants who knows how to appease and seduce a jury, quietly slipping into the role of “the darling.” Her sweet and open-hearted stage presence, verging on the affected and generic, coupled with her unmistakably differentiated fashion sense, undoubtedly helped her win the Audience Choice Award ($5,000). A wise presentation and a well-played set of cards.

Pion also shone in the category that proved the differentiating factor at this year’s Honens. In the words of Jon Kimura Parker, the competition’s artistic director: “Chamber music is at the heart of the complete artist.” This sentence provided a hint into the jury’s decision-making process: all things being equal, chamber music performances outweighed the solo round. Pion’s collaboration with cellist Rachel Mercer in Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata in G minor and the Isidore String Quartet in Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor Op. 14 were among the best that was heard. She also survived a near-catastrophic lapse from an abysmal page-turner in her second semifinal round. That, alone, merits at least a medal.