I thought maybe it might be a good idea to start a 4th thread in this series. Once it gets over 100 pages it's a little unwieldy. :)

What I'm listening to now:

Around midnight on Saturday 18 May the chairman of the jury has announced the names of the 12 candidates who go through to the final of the 2013 piano competition.

In alphabetical order they are : Mateusz Borowiak, Tatiana Chernichka, David Fung, Rémi Geniet, Boris Giltburg, Roope Gröndahl, Sean Kennard, Stanislav Khristenko, Sangyoung Kim, Yuntian Liu, Andrew Tyson, Zhang Zuo.


They will perform at the Brussels Centre for Fine Arts from 27 May until 1st of June, with the National Orchestra of Belgium under the baton of Marin Alsop.

More on the website:

http://www.cmireb.be/

It's that time of decade again, the 14th quadrennial Van Cliburn Competition is about to begin this week....


GET STOKED!!

The world's most amusing international piano competition is to be live webcast for all the world to see -- Friday, Friday, Friday!

What will the three-ring circus bring this time? Certainly a lot of Van Cliburn memorialization. He sadly did not make it to see this one. Now we can no longer exclaim in astonishment at his every piano-competition appearance, "What, Van Cliburn is still alive?"


RIP, Van:


And we wonder what this means for the future of his competition. I especially wonder how it can outdo its own oustanding showing in 2009.
Back then, a bunch of us naive, uneducated piano enthusiasts followed the competition in earnest expectation that the highest awards would go to the most musically talented. But not this time, we're in the know. We are PREPARED! We have already heard the rumors that somehow one member of the jury has 9 students in the competition. We are reading all the relevant New York Times articles on the subject.

We have even made our cynical winners prediction,



"It will go to the first paraplegic pianist to have entered a competition."









"Or Daniil Trifonov."*

Attachment 5689

Let's be honest, six months after God-Knows-What-Competition-Pianist wins the Van Cliburn 2013, most newspaper reporters will forget it and just assume Trifonov won, despite the fact that he is not taking part in the actual competition. After all, his website says he is "Winner of the International Competitions." (ALL OF THE COMPETITIONS ?) So, why not?


No, seriously, there are some good pianists in this competition. Our buddy Alexey Chernov is back, somehow, even though he's been 30 for how many years now? I'm not making this up--in the Richter Competition, apparently he was born in 1979:
http://www.richtercompetition.com/en_part.php?id=2

That's ok, I like how he plays the piano. I learned from this from the Tchaikovsky and Cleveland 2011 competitions, when he was born in 1982. Maybe for the next Tchaikovsky in 2015, he'll be born in 1985. I wish I knew the Russian secret to eternal youth...

Ahem, the young American Claire Huangci is also taking part in this competition. I like how she plays, even if she does the hand ballet. She's also not an Eastern European male, so .. hey, she's got that going for her.


Our buddy "the hobo," Alessandro Deljavan, is back from the 2009 VCC. You will remember him for his sloppy dress and his "I-have-seen-God" face:

and I remember we advanced him to the semis back then too. He's returned along with MANY OTHER ITALIANS. I am calling what was once "Team Western Europe" "Team Italy" this time; it's all Italians with the slight addition of François Dumont. How about the "Team Great Cuisine" ? yeah....! Bring it!


Ok, the competition starts Friday, so we'll be around live blogging. Stay tuned...




*I reserve the right to make as many Trifonov references in this thread as I see fit, and I apologize for none of them. One has to make the competition interesting, right?

Attached Images

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I've been trying to find some large-scale vocal works of the romantic or modern period, but I'm failing miserably. I love the mixture of the four solo voices (bass, tenor, contralto and soprano) along with orchestra and choir, but these pieces are hard to find on those two periods. In some requiem masses, there are moments where all the soloists are singing over the orchestra, but they are few.

Some examples of what I'm looking for:
- Agnus Dei, from Dvorak's Requiem
- Quando corpus morietur and Quis est Homo, from Dvorak's Stabat Mater
- Rex tremendae and Kyrie eleison, from Verdi's Requiem
- Magnus Dominus, from Penderecki's Seven Gates of Jerusalem
- Domine Jesu, from Mozart's Requiem

So, I would really appreciate some help finding pieces similar to these... I'm not looking for operas, as they are formally dialogs, and that somehow removes the effect those other mass-like pieces have.

Thank you.

Yesterday I was in Ghent to attend this wonderful concert.

"Messa da Requiem" Guiseppe Verdi

Musical direction: Dmitri Jurowski
Soprano: Julianna Di Giacomo
Mezzo-soprano: Veronica Simeoni
Tenor: Pavel Černoch
Bass: Mirco Palazzi

Requiem Mass for the living

Verdi composed this mass following the death of Alessandro Manzoni, a true Italian literary icon. Rather than a sublime hymn to life after death, this is a requiem for the living. The image of the impotent man who is left in despair following a loss moved Verdi far more deeply than the grand majesty of a revered deity. Powerful choral passages and dramatic orchestral pieces portray the fate of mankind. So it does not promise us the redemption of salvation, but pays tribute to man in all his mortality.


Great performance :hippy::hippy::hippy: