This isn’t your grandparents’ Van Cliburn Worldwide Piano Competitors.
There was a day when the ultimate spherical of probably the most well-known musical scrimmage of the Americas, held in Fort Value, Texas, was fairly near a looped sequence of the Second and Third Piano Concertos of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, and the inevitable First Piano Concerto of Tchaikovsky.
Now the web is solid huge. The six contenders unveiled Monday will play 10 completely different concertos within the Bass Efficiency Corridor with Marin Alsop and the Fort Value Symphony Orchestra. Which is to say there are solely two repetitions — of Beethoven’s matchlessly poetic Piano Concerto No. 4, by 26-year-old Evren Ozel and his fellow American, 22-year-old Angel Stanislav Wang; and of Prokofiev’s burly Second Concerto, by the 26-year-old Russian, Philipp Lynov, and Carter Johnson, 28, a local of Vancouver Island and the lone Canadian within the operating.
Not that the works heard in 4 classes beginning Tuesday and ending Saturday may very well be referred to as unfamiliar. Lynov and Johnson will supply, respectively, Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. As for these beloved barnburners, Tchaikovsky 1 and Rachmaninoff 3 — the concertos commandeered by Van Cliburn himself in his celebrated victory in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competitors in 1958 — they are going to be given by Ozel (Tchaikovsky) and Wang (Rachmaninoff).
Aristo Sham of China is first up Tuesday night time with Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, a prolix work that’s heard much less typically than it was. On Friday this 29-year-old gives one other German rating of the nineteenth century, Brahms’s four-movement Piano Concerto No. 2. (It ought to in all probability be clarified at this level that every finalist performs two concertos, on completely different days, chosen from separate lists, a system designed to encourage selection.)
Vitaly Starikov, at 30 the oldest competitor to make the finals, has chosen the difficult pairing of Bartók’s tough-as-nails Second Piano Concerto and Schumann’s probing however elusive essay within the type, which was memorably described to me in 2008 by a contest decide on the Concours de musique worldwide de Montréal as “a dying entice.” Starikov lists Russia and Israel because the nations to which he’s hooked up.
Rivals
Sticklers for quotas will word that there are not any ladies among the many six finalists. Chaeyoung Park, 27, one in every of two feminine semifinalists to not make the lower, was additionally the one South Korean semifinalist — a low tally given the worldwide dominance of this nation in competitions, not least the Cliburn, which awarded gold to Yekwon Sunwoo in 2017 and Yunchan Lim in 2022.
Conspiracy theories are devilishly exhausting to maintain in Fort Value. The judges sit in monastic seclusion and don’t seek advice from their colleagues.
“No dialogue, no deliberation,” mentioned Jacques Marquis, Cliburn chief government since 2013, and a Canadian, in a Fb submit. “A sure/no/perhaps course of. Easy and environment friendly.
“As I mentioned many occasions, I don’t want a mix, I need 9 distinct opinions from 9 live performance pianists.”
Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to take a position on how the British-born jury chair Paul Lewis, a pianist famous for his Schubert, feels concerning the cascades of double octaves that inevitably accompany a Cliburn contestant to the end line. One can think about a specific amount of unstated convergence along with his fellow juror Until Fellner, an Austrian who’s, like Lewis, a former pupil of Alfred Brendel.
Regardless of the rigour of the Cliburn course of, there was some on-line unhappiness over the early elimination of Magdalene Ho, a Malaysian pianist of American start and British upbringing. “She confirmed extra character than all the remaining put collectively,” commented the British critic Norman Lebrecht on his broadly learn web site Slipped Disc.
An fascinating subset of the Ho controversy was a requirement by her fan base to put in her within the quarterfinal spot bizarrely deserted by Xiaofu Ju, a 25-year-old Chinese language pianist who walked on stage, sat earlier than the keyboard, stared at his arms, stood once more, bowed and left the stage. The information dispatch from the Cliburn cited “medical causes” for his withdrawal.
The Remaining Stretch
The seek for one thing to be grumpy about is inevitably subsumed within the closing days by the sheer pleasure of the house stretch. For a lot of listeners, nationwide or ethnic favouritism in all probability performs a job. What Canadian in an age of resurgent nationalism can fail to cheer on Johnson, even when (as a resident of Connecticut) he lists a twin affiliation with the US and Canada?
With a inventive method to repertoire (his solo rounds included sonatas by Muzio Clementi and Paul Hindemith) and a style for assertive ornamentation within the obligatory Mozart Concerto (in his case, No. 22 in E flat Ok. 482), this pianist has nearly as good an opportunity as any to medal.
I’ve heard one thing a couple of hockey sport on Wednesday night time. Should miss it. Carter Johnson is enjoying Prokofiev.
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Arthur Kaptainis was classical music critic of the Montreal Gazette from 1986 to 2022 and wrote for the Nationwide Submit from 2010 to 2016. His articles seem in Classical Voice North America and Gramophone in addition to Ludwig Van. Arthur holds an MA in musicology from the College of Toronto. He’s president of the Music Critics Affiliation of North America.
