On one of 2022’s performance-free days, I wrote extensively about The Cliburn on disc, discussing archival performances from past competitions. Many of these have appeared on CD, although the physical discs now are hard to source, for the most part. Still, there’s much to peruse via download and streaming platforms. Last time I suggested that some brave researcher compile a complete and systematic discography of The Cliburn on Record, but that hasn’t happened yet.

So rather than reiterate my 2022 overview, I’m going to backtrack 20 years to 2005 and the Twelfth Cliburn Competition, when Harmonia Mundi issued three CDs, each one respectively devoted to that year’s three top winners.

Although 2005’s Crystal Medalist Sa Chen has long enjoyed a busy and successful international career, she already was a world-class artist in 2005. Indeed, her vividly detailed Cliburn rendition of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit deserved its own Gold Medal. Listen to ‘Le gibet’, for example, where Chen maintains the tolling repeated B flats in perfect perspective with the billowy slow-moving chords that surround them. How Chen survived her insanely fast tempo for ‘Scarbo’ without a scar or the least hint of derailment is a pianistic miracle. The disc also preserves an intelligent and assured reading of Chopin’s B minor Sonata that stands out for the pianist’s flexible, textually diverse pacing of the Largo. By contrast, she goes wild in Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody, and why not? The music can take it.

However, for suppler and more elegant Lisztian pyrotechnics, 2005’s Silver Medalist Joyce Yang truly impresses in the Don Juan Fantasy. In the same composer’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 6, however, Yang’s handling of the marathon repeated octaves sound machine-like and practised to death when you compare them alongside the pulverizing force of Horowitz or Argerich. At first, I found some of her harmonic pointing in Bach’s B minor Overture mannered and arch, but now I hear a freshness of spirit and genuine rhythmic élan. Yang ignores most of the repeats, which I suppose is necessary in the context of a competition. Perhaps the prize of Yang’s disc is Carl Vine’s two-movement Piano Sonata No 1, a virtuoso showstopper if there ever was one. This work has long attracted conservatory students and competition pianists for its ‘conservative modernism’, and as a viable alternative to the Barber Sonata. I like to joke that competitors gravitate towards conservative modernists like Vine and Lowell Liebermann because they’re afraid of Frederic Rzewski! Anyway, Yang throws herself into the music as if she was never going to play it again – her jagged block chords and rapid octave unisons define shock and awe, and must have left the audience limp.

Finally, we have the disc featuring 2005’s Gold Medalist Alexander Kobrin. Revisiting his Rachmaninov Études-tableaux, Op 33, I’m impressed anew at how this pianist creates a distinct sound-world and dramatic trajectory for each selection, while giving the cycle a feeling of unity and cohesion. Kobrin’s ear for harmonic motion and narrative sweep justify a more loosely knit approach to the same composer’s Second Sonata than in leaner, harder-hitting interpretations. By contrast, his droopy and shapeless Chopin B major Nocturne, Op 9 No 3, is over before it begins. But Kobrin more than redeems himself in Brahms’s Paganini Variations, which he treats like music rather than as an Olympic event. He brings subtle colour changes to the repeats, his tempo fluctuations are in perfect proportion, while there’s nuance and fantasy aplenty. As for playing the notes, one takes that for granted. After all, wasn’t it Vladimir Horowitz who said that in order to be more than a virtuoso, one first must be a virtuoso?

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