🇺🇸 Maggie Bai

The competition is judged by a panel of working concert pianists and academics. The 2026 jury comprised the festival's artist-in-residence Asiya Korepanova alongside guest jurors Lucy Mauro and Anthony Pattin. Competitors perform concerto repertoire with the International MostArts Festival Orchestra rather than solo recital programmes, which is a meaningfully harder test: a young pianist can practise a solo work into reliability, but playing a concerto means holding tempo, balance and ensemble against sixty other musicians in real time, usually after very limited rehearsal.

The field she won it from was not soft. William Feng, fourteen, of Seattle took second prize and $5,000. Daniel Beal, eighteen, of Moscow, Idaho, and Jeremy Liu, fourteen, of Naperville, Illinois, tied for third with $2,500 each. Jeremy Liu also took an Audience Favourite Award for a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9; Bethany Reich, eighteen, of Almond, New York took the other for Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20; and Alexander Liu, fifteen, of Short Hills, New Jersey received a Jury Discretionary Award for an encore of two Chopin mazurkas. Half the prize list was aged fourteen or fifteen.

The Young Steinway Artist eligibility attached to the prize is the most practical part of it. Steinway's artist programmes are one of the few structures in classical music that connect a competition result to actual working infrastructure — instruments, venues, presenters — rather than to prize money that is spent and forgotten. For a fifteen-year-old, the difference between a cash prize and an institutional relationship is the difference between a good week and a career mechanism.

Bai's competition record extends beyond MostArts. She was a 2026 finalist in the International Young Artist Concerto Competition, and had appeared in that competition's earlier rounds as a twelve-year-old, which places the 2026 grand prize inside a documented sequence rather than presenting it as an isolated result. Concerto competitions are the specific corner of the classical world she has been working in, consistently, for at least three years.

It should be said clearly that MostArts is a regional American summer festival, not an international competition of the rank of the Van Cliburn or the Chopin. What it has is a ten-year record of identifying pianists early — the 2015 winner returning as a professional soloist in 2026 is the evidence of that — and a prize structure designed to bring winners back. Whether Maggie Bai becomes the next Avery Gagliano is not something any July evening can settle.