I’m back in St. Louis (there’s a production opening tonight at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, www.experienceopera.org , Mozart’s Il Re Pastore, and I’m covering it), which means that I’m watching the final round in the same way as millions of other people: Via the webcast at www.cliburn.tv

I missed the recital by Nobuyuki Tsujii; I was in transit, and I had to download special software before I could watch anything. But I did catch the two concertos, Haochen Zhang playing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor and Di Wu performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor. As always, James Conlon conducted the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, here in a configuration that filled the stage of Bass Hall.

As cool as it is to see closeups and different angles than were mine in Row S Left, one loses a lot of nuance, even with a bandwith-hogging webcast like this one (my daughter has duly registered her objections to my takeover of our DSL connection), and even with a decent sound system (Cambridge SoundWorks). On the plus side, if Zhang was humming as he did in earlier performances, it didn’t come across online.

Both performances were strong, and both demonstrated why they deserve to be on that stage. But if I were still in Fort Worth at this moment, I’d probably be dropping my critical distance to stand and applaud Wu’s astonishing just-completed performance of the Rach 3. She’s convinced me; based solely on her playing in this round, I’d award her the gold medal.