Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner 15th Tchaikovsky Competition, June 10-July 3

Finalists and their accompanists will be required to participate free of charge in the closing ceremonies and concerts on July 2, 2015 in Moscow, and July 3, 2015 in St. Petersburg.

From the competition rules:

Kharitonov looked very tired, dark around the eyes, in the backstage closeups just prior to or after (don't remember which) the final round, like he'd lost sleep. But that would be speculation.

I wanted to add a link to the automated (but therefore somewhat primitive) Google translation of the Russian site with the brief interview of Gergiev about Masleev, Geniusas, Li, and Verbier, etc.

http://bit.ly/tch15-engstrom-en


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Again no words for Kharitonov.He is excommumicated.

Finally, does anyone really think that someone representing the political view held by the Russian government got together with the jury and procured an agreement to fix the result in favour of a Russian – either on the basis of the 175th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s birth, or – even more fantastically – on the basis of keeping up the Russian end in the face of opposition to Russian actions in Ukraine? For God’s sake get real. What would we – the jury members – get out of it?
Some berk in these pages even implied that Valery Gergiev offered us engagements as soloist with one of his orchestras if we acceded to his pressure – presumably directly via him from the Russian President – to fix it for a Russian winner. Give me a break. I know for a certain fact that Gergiev openly stated that he didn’t care at all what nationality the winners were – only that they were deemed the best by the juries. The whole piano jury, as far as I could ascertain, felt exactly the same, and neither Maestro Gergiev, nor the competition management – nor indeed, Vladimir Putin – applied even the remotest suggestion of any pressure.

One quote seems particularly relevant, due to conspiracy theories and completely unfounded speculation by some members here:

[
Only that depends on who's in the audience, even the name of the nationality can be subject to change (e.g., 'Taiwan' v.s. 'China Taipei' :-)!

Peter Donohoe has written an extensive post on the whole matter, which is most relevant for the discussion here. Do read it.

http://slippedisc.com/2015/07/tchaikovsky-backlash-a-judge-explains/

With the excitement of the competition over, do people here who've watched/listened to most, or all of the earlier rounds have any recommendations for individual performances that are exceptional? (Especially if they know which ones Donohoe was thinking of in his blog ).

I don't feel inclined to hear every performance of every performer (- so far, all I've heard are the finals, and some of the earlier rounds of the finalists), but would like a good representative sample of the best of the best (as Tom Cruise would say in Top Gun) .

Perhaps you can also comment on why you think your chosen performances stand out.

i hope to make my way thru many of the performances over time, since they're up on the medici.tv site, but of the performances i've sampled, george li delivers the goods -- brilliant, precise, refined, expressivo...