For the Cliburn’s Final Round, each of the six competitors performs two concertos with the Fort Worth Symphony under the direction of Marin Alsop. The first concerto must be chosen from a list including the five of Beethoven, the two of Chopin, Liszt and Ravel, the Schumann and Grieg A minor, Saint-Saëns’s Second and Fifth, Gershwin’s F major and Rhapsody in Blue, and the Mendelssohn G minor. Their second concerto choice can be any work for piano and orchestra lasting up to 42 minutes, although the longer Brahms Concertos Nos 1 and 2 are accepted as exceptions.

Each of the four Final Round Concerts features three concerto performances. The first one began with Aristo Sham in the Mendelssohn G minor, a work often assigned to talented students because it covers all technical bases, it goes over with any audience, and it doesn’t require particular interpretive depth. But it has inherent charm and lots of dramatic potential, qualities that Sham didn’t consistently project. He played the scintillating unison octave passages and rip-roaring runs with enviable smoothness and evenness, yet all within a limited dynamic range and with not much colour and singing legato. Actually the cackling woodwinds and penetrating brass licks provided this performance’s principal musical interest.

Watch Aristo Sham's performance:

Similarly, Angel Stanislav Wang skated on the surface of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. He lingered over his opening solo, only to have Alsop correct him by bringing the orchestra in with a faster and steadier tempo. Like Sham in the Mendelssohn, Wang’s dynamic range in the Beethoven settled within mezzo-piano and mezzo-forte parameters, and paid little heed to Beethoven’s sudden shifts from forte to piano and vice-versa. Again, it was left to Alsop and the orchestra to do the heavy lifting. Not that it matters, but Wang played the commonly heard first movement cadenza favored by Schnabel, Fleisher and Arrau.

Angel Stanislav Wang:

Many competition pianists look upon Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 as a platform to show off and strut their stuff, while treating conductor and orchestra as doormats. By contrast, Evren Ozel is a collaborator through and through, whose assured and refined command of the solo part was intricately integrated into the music’s orchestral fabric. As a result, the relationship between the piano and orchestra strived for and achieved rare symphonic cohesion. Motives passed back and forth in collusion rather than competition, while Ozel’s precise alignment of accents and phrase groupings in rapid passages created a ballet of the mind. I was struck by how Ozel’s sonority projected across Bass Hall with clarity and definition no matter how loud or soft. The tempo and energy somewhat flagged towards the end of the long first movement, yet textures remained buoyant and judiciously balanced. Indeed, the interpretation’s lyrical attitude is remarkably close to the nobility of Van Cliburn’s own million selling recording, either by intention or by coincidence. Or perhaps a bit of both.

Evren Ozel:

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