she is blown, my mind
I almost shit myself
Click to view(Van Cliburn competition semifinals, from 1 June 2013, Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth)
Amazing. Without qualifying modifiers.
This kid is the only semifinalist in the competition who had the balls to take on the Franck quintet, and he fucking massacred it; he took the top award for the chamber music phase of the semifinals (saying nothing about the fact that he was also the overall winner).
Not for nothing is the Franck the least-performed of the four quintets on the Van Cliburn chamber music list (the other three are the Brahms op. 34, the Dvořák op. 81/B 155, and the Schumann op. 44); it is, for all its beautiful sounds, a technical shitstorm for all the musicians from almost the outset (particularly considering all the too-many-to-count notation errors in every published edition of the score).
I do wish I had been there (particularly so I could have blown spitballs at the first violinist for all the extraneous chair-dancing), but alas, I am still poor and can't afford tickets to the main parts of the Cliburn competition, though I'm certainly not above “next-best thinging” it, because the production staff for the competition webcasts get how to film chamber music performances.
I've been really wrapped up in the chamber music round of the Cliburn competition for a couple of years, triggered after I got back into playing a few years ago. The first piece I got thrown into when I joined ACMC was the Dvořák with Daleesa & the Gang, and I surprised myself a little bit by how much technique I actually had, despite all the trauma I went through with He Whose Name Shall Not Be Uttered in his Studio Of Perpetually Smug-Faced Patriarchal Emotional Abuse. Over time, I played “the two” clarinet quintets (Mozart and Brahms) with Pastor Brian & the Gang, then back to piano quintets with the Brahms for Karen & the Gang. I almost thought that I might be A Competent Chamber Cellist until I hit the frustratingly solid and unyielding wall of Violinists Truly Worthy of Public Ridicule.
I want to see if there's still a professional-caliber performer in me before I get too old to appreciate it (even if there's no money to be made with it in the foreseeable future), and the Franck seems like the mountain to climb now.