Đặng Thái Sơn: The First Asian Chopin Winner, and the Teacher Behind Three More
In 1980 he became the first Asian to win the Chopin Competition. Forty-five years later, his students have won it three more times.
[Đặng Thái Sơn: The First Asian Chopin Winner, and the Teacher Behind Three More]
October 1980. The Warsaw Philharmonic Hall.
A 22-year-old Vietnamese man sat down at the piano for the finals of the Chopin International Piano Competition. He was about to play Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2. It was the first time in his life he had ever performed with an orchestra.
That night, he took the gold — the first Asian winner in the competition's history.
His name was Đặng Thái Sơn, and he came from a country that had been at war less than five years earlier.
▍ The piano teacher's son, and a piano full of mice
Đặng Thái Sơn was born in Hanoi in 1958. His father was a poet who was sent to a labor camp for taking part in a literary reform movement. He was gone early. His mother, Thái Thị Liên, was a pianist later known as the "godmother of Vietnamese piano." She raised him alone.
He started learning piano from his mother at five, then enrolled at the Hanoi Conservatory.
In 1965, the U.S. began large-scale bombing of North Vietnam. The conservatory's students and teachers evacuated to the mountains near the Chinese border, dragging the school's only piano behind a water buffalo. The piano was falling apart. Mice lived inside it.
Students took turns practicing — twenty minutes each. When it wasn't your turn, you drew black and white keys on cardboard and practiced on that. When the bombs came, you hid in a shelter. When they stopped, you went back to practicing.
On nights without air raids, his mother would sit at that broken piano and play Chopin nocturnes. Đặng Thái Sơn later said it was the image he'd never forget.
▍ Everyone was watching someone else — he took the gold
In 1974, Soviet pianist Isaac Katz visited Hanoi, heard Đặng Thái Sơn play, and recommended him for Moscow. Three years later he entered the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Three years after that, he was in Warsaw.
That year's Chopin Competition was a mess. Yugoslav contestant Ivo Pogorelich was eliminated in the third round, splitting the jury down the middle. Legendary pianist Martha Argerich quit the panel in protest, publicly calling Pogorelich a genius. The media couldn't stop talking about the scandal.
Đặng Thái Sơn won the gold quietly, in the middle of all that noise. On top of the first prize, he took home three special awards — best mazurka, best polonaise, and best concerto.
After walking out, Argerich sent a telegram from Geneva to congratulate him.
▍ Vietnam's youngest People's Artist, at 26
After winning, Đặng Thái Sơn performed in over forty countries, known especially for his interpretations of Chopin and the French repertoire. In 1984, at just 26, he received Vietnam's "People's Artist" honor — the youngest person ever to hold the country's highest cultural title.
In 1991, he moved to Montreal with his mother and has held both Vietnamese and Canadian citizenship since. In over thirty years abroad, he never lost touch with Vietnam, returning regularly for concerts and masterclasses.
▍ Three Chopin Competitions, two champions from his studio
He taught piano at the Université de Montréal for twenty years, later joining the Oberlin Conservatory and the New England Conservatory in the U.S. He has served on the Chopin Competition jury five times.
In 2015, his students swept third through fifth place. In 2021, his student Bruce Liu won outright.
In 2025, Eric Lu returned to Warsaw a decade after his first attempt. At 27, he chose Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 for the final — the same piece his teacher had played to win in 1980.
In nearly a century of the Chopin Competition, they are the only teacher-student pair to have won with the same concerto. That same year, another student of Đặng Thái Sơn's, Zitong Wang, took third place.
The numbers: across the 2015, 2021, and 2025 Chopin Competitions, Đặng Thái Sơn's students produced two champions and two bronze medalists. No other teacher in the competition's history comes close.
In 2023, his mother Thái Thị Liên passed away in Hanoi at the age of 106.
In 2026, Đặng Thái Sơn is 67. He's still teaching. Still performing.
Sixty years separate the broken, mouse-infested piano in the mountains from the Steinway at the Warsaw Philharmonic. The boy who once practiced on cardboard now sits on the jury, watching his own student win with the same piece he played.
▍ Quick facts
Name: Đặng Thái Sơn
Born: July 2, 1958
Birthplace: Hanoi
Nationality: Vietnamese, Canadian
Key achievement: 1980 Chopin International Piano Competition champion (first Asian winner)
Current positions: Piano professor at Oberlin Conservatory and New England Conservatory
Chopin Competition champions from his studio: Bruce Liu (2021), Eric Lu (2025)
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