Nobuyuki Tsujii (final recital)

Well, I could have predicted from the outset than Tsujii would be better suited to middle-period Beethoven than late Beethoven. He started his recital with the "Appassionata" Sonata, and he took the first movement slower than usual (slower than I would have liked, frankly), but it still worked from a musical standpoint. The second and third movements impressed me more than any of his solo playing. The second was done with sensitivity and tact, and the third evoked Beethoven's characteristic angst pretty well. Hmm, maybe the shallow first-round performance was the result of nerves, and he's settling down as a musician now that he's gotten comfortable with the crowds here.

He played Chopin's Berceuse next, a lullaby with increasingly complex configurations played over an unchanging soothing bass line. I liked the shaping he did on the piece's simpler melodic phrases, but I've heard it played to more spine-tingling effect elsewhere. It was a professional account of the piece. He ended with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and I always admire any pianist who plays it without being intimidated by the specter of Bugs Bunny. Tsujii took a middle-of-the-road approach that I liked, not trying to speed it up and show that he can play it superhumanly fast, and not slowing it down and trying to show that it's a serious piece of music. (Because it's not.) This pianist still isn't all there as an interpreter, but more than ever I'm convinced that greater emotional depth and intelligence will come in the future. He has everything else he needs to make a career.

Son Yeol-eum (Concerto I)

Okay, so this is the best concerto performance we've heard so far. After hearing Chopin's First Concerto the last two nights, Son Yeol-eum played his Second. She hadn't played Chopin at all in the earlier rounds, and all I can say is, if she'd played Chopin like that earlier, I would've come over to her side a lot sooner. Well, no matter.

Her account of this concerto was elegant and graceful, but then again, you'd have expected that. What I didn't expect was her handle on Chopin's idiom and her total confidence in the way she was playing. It was the same pleasant surprise that I got out of Di Wu's Beethoven: "Oh, so she can play this, too." Unlike the other performances, this one didn't vary in levels of quality between movements. This was good all the way through. (I thought I heard her touch getting a little heavy at the very end, but it wasn't enough to damage what came before.) The declamatory passages were authoritative without losing their beauty, and the soft passages were carefully molded while still sounding spontaneous. Everybody talks about this pianist's finesse and tone, but I've heard relatively little about her creativity and sharp musical mind. Is this because she's a woman and qualities like "touch" and "finesse" are more traditionally associated with women? It'll probably take more than the time I have between performances to figure that out. The important thing is, I wasn't completely sold on her before, but now I finally believe. This feels good.

Nobuyuki Tsujii (Concerto I)

I mentioned that Di Wu had a tough act to follow last night coming after Bozhanov, but Tsujii had to follow him, too, because he was playing the same piece as the Bulgarian: Chopin's First Concerto. The Japanese's rendition of it wasn't as fluid as Bozhanov's, and it certainly wasn't as polished. However, it was a creditable performance all the same, convincing on its own terms. (And that sound you hear is the sound of the comment-thread denizens gnawing on the bone that I just threw them.) Tsujii has more experience playing with orchestras than with chamber groups, and he did a good job of differentiating his instrument from the orchestra without banging on the keys. He showed some ability to modulate his sound (not enough in some spots, but still...) and he didn't race past the music in the second movement the way he did in the Chopin etudes in the prelims. Here's an intriguing question: Is he better playing with other musicians than he is as a solo recitalist? I think he might be. On paper, this concerto figured to be the part of his final round that was most likely to give him trouble, and he got through it with no major glitches. His other final-round performances look to be well-suited to his strengths. So that's good, then.

Evgeni Bozhanov (Concerto I)

The Cliburn finalists play two concertos, one from a preselected list of Classical Era concertos, and one of their own choosing. In the past, each session of the final round featured one performance from the former group and one from the latter. This year, though, they're playing the Classical concertos in the same sessions on the early nights of the round and then letting us hear the more modern works later. We'll see how well that works out, and if we get fatigued from listening from so much Rachmaninov and Prokofiev at once.

Bozhanov turns in an alert, commanding performance of Chopin's First Concerto. He's particularly stylish in the slow second movement, turning the piano part into delicious little curlicues of sound. Then he plays the third movement with great rhythmic zest. He magnifies his sound so that he stands out from the orchestra without losing the essential beauty of his tone, and he applies clever little interpretive touches everywhere in the music. This performance is thoroughly delightful, and as good as he's been, I don't think we've seen everything he can do yet. Can't wait to find out.

Mariangela Vacatello (final recital)

An Italian playing the Italian Concerto! If that seems a bit predetermined, Vacatello didn't play it that way, delivering an Italian with more point and less color than Vondracek, though there was still plenty of color. I particularly liked the gentle but insistent rhythm she put under the "Andante." She then played Chopin's Rondo in E-flat, a relatively obscure piece that she rendered with aristocratic elegance and no small amount of humor. She couldn't convince me that the piece deserved more of a hearing (I think she could have done as well with a couple of Chopin's waltzes), but the pianism was attractive.

Then things took a bad turn with Gaspard de la Nuit, the first of three performances of this in this final round, after we had only one in the prelims and none in the semis. There were some slips in "Le gibet" and "Scarbo," but I could have forgiven those if she played it with the right unwholesomeness. This is a piece that needs to smell like death, and so far we don't have any evidence that this pianist can conjure that up. There was no edge of menace in any of the sections, and "Le gibet" lost all forward momentum. There was so little tension in "Scarbo" that I wondered if she wasn't just running out of gas at this point.

She did manage to rescue herself a bit in Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue in D-flat major, preserving the Russian dance-like character of the piece and even playing it with a ferocity that she really could have used in Gaspard. It was a rousing conclusion, though I'm still not sure about her prospects going forward in this competition. She's got the two concertos left to play.

Zhang Haochen (semifinal recital)

The kid didn't get off to the best start. He couldn't seem to take his foot off the pedal for the early Chopin Preludes. It was only when he played No. 8 that the performance suddenly shifted into focus, and after that he was generally better in the dark, stormy minor-key preludes (especially Nos. 16, 18, 22, and 24) than he was in the cheerful major-key ones, though he also gave excellent accounts of Nos. 17 and 23.

Then he played White Lies for Lomax, and though he couldn't match Lam for command of the piece's American qualities, neither was he completely adrift like Bozhanov. He tried to compensate with sheer volume when he wasn't sure, but he was still much closer to the former than the latter.

He finished with Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody, giving a drier, more pointed account of it than either Stephen Beus or Son Yeol-eum in the prelims. I would've said "tighter," but he dithered a bit too much in the slower portions of the piece. Even so, he gave the piece the proper panache and confirmed what we already knew about him: This is an exceptional young talent. Let's see what else he can do.

Naomi Kudo

Before the next contestant began, our host Steve Cumming gave a lot of information about blind pianists, who don't use Braille music notation because piano music is too complex to render into Braille. Nobuyuki Tsujii, like other blind classical pianists, learns largely by ear. Cumming knows this because he is the station manager for a radio station for the blind during the day. He gave out quite a bit of useful advice.

This was a tough act for Naomi Kudo to follow. I heard her at the TCU screening recitals as well, and promptly forgot every aspect of her performance. I was listening a bit more closely today, but her performance of Carl Vine's Piano Sonata No. 1 was handicapped by having followed Spencer Myer's yesterday. She was more forceful but less cohesive than Myer, and overall she was less memorable. I wonder if I would have been more impressed if I'd heard her performance first. Her rendition of "Triana" from Albeniz' Iberia washed over me without leaving a mark as well.

She did rather better with her finishing piece, giving an attractive account of Chopin's B minor Sonata. Her playing of the gently cascading second movement was particularly beautiful. Still, the third movement didn't have the ferocity that the music required, and because of the hole she was in, she needed a tremendous performance of the sonata, not just a good one. Too bad.

Nobuyuki Tsujii

The Japanese pianist came onstage accompanied by his mother, because he is completely blind. It's interesting that most of the blind pianists in history have been on the pop and jazz side. There were some guys sitting behind me last night making predictable jokes about the irony of a blind pianist playing a piece called Images. Tsujii is no charity case, though. He has a big, brash, confident sound, and every note in his performance of Chopin Op. 10 Etudes (aside from a few noticeable errors) was crisply articulated enough to make you weep. That's the good news.

The bad news is that as an interpreter, he's not quite there yet. He went right past the music in the famous third etude, because he couldn't wait to get to the thirds. His Debussy sounded exactly like the Chopin, too, though he ended his program with Liszt's "La Campanella," a piece tailored to his strengths. The good news within the bad news is that he's only 20 years old, and there's every reason to think that he'll mature musically with time. I think it'd be a mistake for the Cliburn to reward him now when he isn't ready. The crowd that gave him a loud and lengthy ovation would disagree with me, though. Whatever happens, he's made it this far on his own merits, and that's pretty amazing.

Spencer Myer

Cleveland native Spencer Myer strode very purposefully to the piano (he's tall, so he was there very quickly), and 50 minutes later he made a believer out of me. I was skeptical initially during his pleasant account of one of Beethoven's less substantial piano sonatas (Op. 78 in F-sharp minor), but his sound grew on me. He seems utterly incapable of making an ugly sound on the piano. His notes were shimmering and iridescent as he took on Chopin's Barcarolle and five Debussy preludes. These were delightful, and some of his passagework on Debussy's "Feux d'artifice" ("Fireworks") was simply incredible.

It took some courage for him to end his program with Carl Vine's First Piano Sonata instead of a more traditional showpiece, but he made a cohesive and convincing case that this 1990 work is a very good piece of music indeed. This piece required a bit more spikiness of him than the rest of his program did, and he proved up to it. He'll have to ratchet it up a notch if he makes it to the semis, because he's scheduled to play Copland's Piano Variations. All in all, this was a very pretty program, and initially I thought that he should have mixed it up a bit more. But then again, I can see the strategy behind establishing your identity and playing to your strengths. Even if he proves incapable of doing something else, he's always a pleasure to hear. There are worse things in the world to be.

Natasha Kudritskaya

The Ukrainian pianist, a very thin woman, came out in an interesting ensemble that included a black top, brown pants, and lace-up Adidas shoes. (Were they sneakers? Looked like it.) She took some moments spacing out before she started each piece, seemingly trying to get her head in the right place.

She played Chopin's Second Piano Sonata and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, and she was excellent when it came to the lyrical parts, but in both pieces she lacked power. I don't think this is a gender thing; I've seen tiny women produce huge volumes of sound from the piano before, but Kudritskaya couldn't produce the kind of sound necessary to both pieces. Gaspard (unbelievably, this is the only rendition of it we're scheduled to hear in the first round) didn't have that edge of menace that the piece is supposed to have. It's supposed to be dripping with evil.

She did much better with the Scriabin waltz at the end. That was played with delicacy and lightness of touch. This contestant definitely has some talent. I think she could have chosen her pieces better. If she makes it to the next round, her semifinal program might show her off in a better light.