San Antonio International Piano Competition
The medalists, and the one that got away
October 24, 2012The folks in charge of the San Antonio International Piano Competition allowed me no excuse for missing the finals on Oct. 20, or the winners’ recital the following day. No need to drive to Ruth Taylor Recital Hall: The events were streamed live on the Internet, courtesy of NOWcastSA.
How did it work? Pretty well. NOWcastSA’s Tricaster (the equipment that records audio and video and streams the content to the Web server, in this case at Livestream.com) was misbehaving for a while during the finals, so there were several interruptions in the stream until the equipment rebooted. The sound was too compressed for my taste -- OK for talk, but not for serious music. And there was some annoying distortion coming from the left channel during the winners’ recital.
If conditions were not ideal, the sound was good enough to provide a fair hearing of the competitors and their artistry. Click here for the video clips, which should remain for a few weeks.
Alas, one of the five selected to compete in the final round had to withdraw because of a family emergency. The remaining four played at a high level, differing more in style and predilection than in technical ability.
The gold medalist, Lo-An Lin of Taiwan, was, to my ear, the most musical of the finalists. I especially liked her crisp, witty, rhythmically precise account of Paul Hindemith’s Sonata 1922 and her lovely lyrical line in the third of five very interesting modernist Bagatelles by the contemporary Australian composer Carl Vine. Ms. Lin demonstrated impressive facility throughout her final round. After completing her master’s degree at under Nelita True at Eastman, she is headed to Yale to pursue her artist diploma.
Silver medalist Angelo Arciglione of Italy impressed with his clarity in Aleksander Scriabin’s “Black Mass” Sonata and a set of four preludes by Claude Debussy, whose distinctive pulse came through nicely. Mr. Arciglione technique and power seemed limitless in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableau, Op. 39, No. 1 and Serge Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 3.
I found bronze medalist Yejin Noh, from the Republic of Korea, a trifle cautious and bland in Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4 and two pieces from Enrique Granados’s “Goyescas,” but my impression might have been affected by the frequent interruptions of the streaming video in these works. Samuel Barber’s Sonata came off quite a bit better, especially in the leggero runs of the scherzo and the well-supported long lines of the adagio mesto. She had a very nice touch.
Paul Moravec, who wrote the competition’s commissioned work, gave Ms. Noh the award for the best performance of it. Titled “Upsparkles,” the piece is tremendously difficult, parts of it highly complex and riddled with fast runs. It’s a strong, compact piece, and I suspect it may have a long life as an encore.
The fourth performing finalist, Younggun Kim, is a Canadian who was born in the Republic of Korea. He showed ample facility in everything he played. His articulation skewed to a triphammer crispness that worked best in the outer allegros of Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7, not so well in Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2.
A word about the finalist who couldn’t stay for the final round: Mei Rui, born in Shanghai and now an American, holds degrees in both music and molecular biochemistry from Yale. As I didn’t attend the preliminary rounds and thus missed her entirely, I decided to check her out on YouTube. I’m glad I did.
Her go-for-broke account of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, with a huge, fearless traversal of the first movement, a totally committed plunge into the depths of the slow movement and a wild ride through the fugue definitely made me want to hear more. She struck me as a musician who doesn’t just have something important to say about the music she’s playing, but about the world.
Mike Greenberg
