The Cliburn finals: Concert 4
FORT WORTH The finals of the 13th International Van Cliburn Piano Competition are like a marathon; each of the six finalists performs three major programs in five days. There’s a 50-minute recital, a concerto with chamber orchestra, and a concerto with full orchestra.
Some sort of special award for stamina should go to the young South Korean, Yeol Eun Sun, who performed all three of her final programs back to back to back: her recital on on Thursday night, her small concerto on Friday night, and her large concerto on Saturday afternoon.
Saturday morning featured a symposium with conductor James Conlon; everyone then returned after lunch for the first of the day’s double-header.
The afternoon’s concert began with a recital by Haochen Zhang of China, who commenced by carefully wiping the keyboard with a white cloth and then wiping his hands on his trousers. Musically, he began with Brahms’s Variations & Fugues on a Theme by Handel, op. 24. Brahms runs through all the possibilities in Handel’s tune, small to large, light to heavy, and Zhang accurately captured all the moods.
There were three performances of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, out of six recitals; Zhang gave the second of them. His was an improvement over Mariangela Vacatello’s on Wednesday night, with ethereal playing and a strong ending. Zhang’s playing is consistently marred, however, by his persistent, irritatingly tuneless humming; the acoustic in Bass Hall is excellent, and he carries all too well.
Son’s big concerto was Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor. Son showed that she has power and tremendous facility in her playing, not just beauty of sound, in a performance that held the listener rapt.
Son, too, has an arsenal of vocal sound effects; she doesn’t hum, she whooshes, in sharp intakes of breath like a child imitating a fighter plane. It detracts from her otherwise excellent playing.
Haochen Tsujii of Japan offered Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, in an impressive reading. He didn’t find all there is to discover in this score, but he’s only 20; this is an artist to watch, and not just because of the human interest element of a pianist blind since birth who learns complex scores by listening to recordings.
