Before delving into details about Friday’s Final Round concert, I’ll take a brief detour across the street from Bass Performance Hall to the Steinway & Sons Fort Worth showroom, where free lunchtime concerts have taken place throughout this past week. The concerts featured short performances by non-finalist competitors. I wasn’t able to catch them all, but I welcomed the opportunity to hear certain pianists live whose playing I’d only experienced online.

For example, while Callum McLachlan’s Preliminary-Round Schumann Waldszenen sounded fine via YouTube, the transmission frankly didn’t do justice to the warmth and body of his gorgeous sonority in person. I also found Roman Fediurko much more of a colourist live than online, as he tossed off Josef Hofmann’s Kaleidoskop with great flair. Mention should be made of Xuanxiang Wu’s flexible and poetically heartfelt ‘Ondine’ from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, and the fresh air and subtle spice that Pedro López Salas breathed into Chopin’s four Op 33 Mazurkas.

Three substantial and demanding works occupied the penultimate Final Round concert, starting with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 in a far and away superior reading to Wednesday night’s. The Fort Worth Symphony clearly had settled into the music under Marin Alsop’s taut and rhythmically centered leadership. Attacks and releases, important counter lines and rapid chordal passages came into firm yet pliable alignment, providing an ideal orchestral framework for soloist Evren Ozel. His cultivated pianism and stylistic awareness contrasted to Angel Stanislav Wang’s relatively shapeless note spinning in the same work two nights ago. The first movement’s cascading triplet runs and reams of double notes transpired as smoothly as 60-year-old malt whisky, as well as the Rondo Finale’s perfectly poised hair-trigger soloist/ensemble exchanges. Ozel’s eloquent phrasing and pearly legato particularly told in the slow movement, where the unanimity of the declamatory unison string lines proved far bolder and secure than on Wednesday. Ozel’s flawlessly rippling handling of the solo part was too reticent and Apollonian for my personal taste; I would have preferred a greater degree of dynamic inflection and angularity in the manner of pianists so disparate as Schnabel, Arrau and Moravec. After all, this is Beethoven, not Mozart.

The glitter in Angel Stanislav Wang’s outfit didn’t extend into his unquestionably proficient yet ultimately anonymous virtuosity in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3. I’ll try to explain why I find his pianism uninteresting. His dynamic range is too constricted for my liking. He has a tendency to deflate his phrases, meaning that a melodic line will start decisively, only to lose direction as it unfolds, with final notes either underplayed or even inaudible. Expressive gestures in unaccompanied passages sound arbitrary and devoid of harmonic planning. In essence, everything Wang touches sounds the same. Two textual notes: Wang wisely omits several superfluous bars from the first-movement cadenza (as did the composer himself and Vladimir Horowitz); he played the leaner, quicksilver one that Horowitz and Argerich favoured, rather than following the lead of Van Cliburn and so many young competition contestants with the thicker, lumbering option. Furthermore, Wang made the once common but now rarely adopted third-movement cut two bars after rehearsal number No 52 to No 54, and more power to him for that. At least Wang benefitted from excellent orchestral and podium support.

By total contrast, Aristo Sham took command of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 2 and ran away with it, infusing the gnarly solo part with purpose, direction, structural awareness, technical finesse and mature artistry. Some of his tempos teetered on exceeding the local speed limit (the fourth movement coda, for example) yet nothing derailed or blurred under his control. The Scherzo’s clarion transparency gave extra sting and excitement to the confrontational outbursts, while the final pages had a bracing, unrelenting drive worthy of the classic Rudolf Serkin, Leon Fleisher and Claudio Arrau recordings. In addition, Sham’s articulation of Brahms’s frequent cross-rhythmic effects consistently moved long phrases over the bar lines; nothing came off remotely heavy-handed or foursquare. In the slow movement, Sham captured both the music’s rapture and strife as he floated the cantilenas and trills to high heaven. Judging from the Fort Worth Symphony’s inspired playing, I could sense that Marin Alsop was pleased with her young soloist, and that she clearly considers him a mature artist. Although I hesitate to predict the competition’s outcome, I suspect that Sham’s Brahms interpretation will factor positively one way or another into the jury’s final decisions.

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