Son Yeol-eum (semifinal recital)

I watched her in the concert hall rather in the viewing room (like I did in the first round), and I gained a rather more favorable impression of her. She started with six Debussy preludes, and her candy-sweet tone came across. She gave "Les collines d'Anacapri" ("The Hills of Anacapri") a gentle, hushed beauty, but she could bring the power, too, in "Ce qu'a vu le vent d'Ouest" ("What the West Wind Saw"). There were some odd rhythms in "La fille aux cheveux de lin" ("The Girl With the Flaxen Hair"), but maybe she was working from a different edition than the one I learned the piece from.

She then went with Leopold Godowsky's Symphonic Transformation of Themes from Die Fledermaus. It got a huge ovation from the crowd. I liked the playing fine, but I didn't like the piece. It was written by one of the great pianists of his time, using some recognizable tunes from a popular opera and covering them in tons and tons of pianistic embellishments. It struck me like the musical equivalent of sculpting a butterfly with 20 tons of concrete. I would have been more impressed if she'd chosen Godowsky's studies on Chopin's etudes, which contain some passages that'll make even hardened piano virtuosos ask "How the hell do I play this?"

Then she played White Lies for Lomax, and this fourth performance to date was easily the second best so far. She concluded with Barber's Piano Sonata, and though it was more restrained than Beus', with greater attention to tone, I thought the structural nuances of this massive four-movement piece got away from her, especially in the middle movements. The crowd ate it up, though.

Stephen Beus

Well, hot damn! I saw this tall, bespectacled American pianist (whose last name rhymes with "deuce") four years ago when he competed at the 2005 Cliburn, and this afternoon's performance reminded me why I liked him. Stephen Beus' performances of Bach's English Suite No. 3, Barber's Piano Sonata, and Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody were bright, sharp, clean, articulate, and intelligent, just like his Chopin and Debussy from four years ago. In addition, he produced torrents of sound during the Barber sonata, showing that a muscularity that wasn't in evidence in 2005, and an ability to hold together a large-scale work. And then he absolutely smoked the Liszt piece, bringing the auditorium (about 3/4 full, as opposed to half full during Kudritskaya's performance) to its feet. I think the standing ovation is overused generally, but here it was well deserved. The guy's got flair and showmanship now to go with all his other musical gifts. We're only two competitors in, and already it looks like we have a winner. I like how this is going.