The 17-year-old Plumstead violinist, Emma Steenkamp, clinched the gold medal and the Michael Maas Memorial Prize of R36 000 at the 2024 National Youth Music Competition (NYMC).
The competition concluded on Saturday December 7 with a gala concert at the Endler Hall in Stellenbosch with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.
Hailing from Plumstead, Emma is a student at the Wells Cathedral School, a specialist music school in the UK.
Two pianists, Yu Qing Peng, 16, and Chanda Bupe Lupambo, 19, were respectively second and third, winning R15 500 and R10 000.
Yu Qing is a pupil at the SAHETI School in Bedfordview and Chanda is a BMus Student at Stellenbosch University.
The category winners were Yu Qing Peng, piano; Emma Steenkamp, strings; James Cilliers, 18, wood instruments (saxophone); and Kyrah Adams, 18, other instruments (marimba). Each pocketed R6 000 and a silver medal.
The NYMC winner and rankings are decided cumulatively over the week-long competition.
There were five category runners-up, each earning a bronze medal and R3 500. They were pianists Christian-Peter Hiemstra, 14, Chanda Bupe Lupambo, and Hermanus Schmidt, 16; cellist Rebecca Gray, 14; and saxophonist Kian Goliath, 17.
Five of the candidates, who did not play in the third and fourth rounds, were recognised as the most promising in two of the five NYMC categories. They each won R3 500. They were Bernadette Goemans, 19, Helen Lin-Lin Liu, 19, and Jayden Li, 15, in the strings category, and Quinn Goliath, 15, and Talitha Pienaar, 18, in the category of woodwind instruments.
Emma Steenkamp won three of the special prizes, namely the prize for the best performance of a South African work (R3 500), the Polina Burdukova prize (R5 000) for the best performance of a work by a Russian composer by a string instrumentalist, as well as the prize for the best performance of a concerto in the final round (R5 000).
Yu Qing Peng walked away with the Pauline Nossel prize (R5 000) for the best performance of a classical work by a pianist. He has earned in total (R32 000).
