I got into the press room early to listen to Di Wu's chamber performance again. I had to slow down the player on the Cliburn's video webcast page to the lowest bitrate to get the audio flowing smoothly (which was the part that I cared about), and even then the audio kept cutting out if I tried to look at CNN's website on another page while the broadcast was playing. So I couldn't do the high-tech version of playing classical music while reading the paper.
No matter. I guess my ears were just jaded past the point of usefulness when I listened to her on Thursday night, because the performance I heard this morning with fresh ears was smooth and solid. The overplaying I heard on Thursday still popped up occasionally on the webcast, but overall the balance was much better than I remembered it. Di Wu and the Takacs players turned in a gently swaying second movement and a third-movement scherzo with the proper bounce. She sounded nearly as good as the subsequent performances by Lifits and Deljavan, and for someone without their chamber experience, that's pretty impressive.
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