It has been an unusual Axa Dublin International Piano Competition. Attendances at the earlier rounds were down (not helped by the fine weather) and the atmosphere hasn't come at all close to the heat of partisan involvement exhibited by audiences in previous years. Perhaps everything is clear to the jury, but no one I've met has been able to bring any real clarity to the likely rankings.
My own view is that, so far, it's been a year more notable for solidity of pianistic achievement than musical insight, and players who've strayed outside of rather narrow conventions have been seen as a bad risk by the jury.
Perhaps the most interesting survivor at the moment is Alexei Nabioulin, whose semi-final programme offered the complete surprise of an extraordinarily gentle and reticent account of Schubert's Sonata in B flat, D960, and a stirring, colourful reading of Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka.
Alexander Taylor offered the musically straightest playing of Liszt's Sonata in B minor, in a competition notable for performances that tended to mix full-throttle mode and dreamy indulgence (the faster speeds fluctuating in tandem with the rise and fall in the performer's ability to handle the technical difficulties, and the slower passages twisted out of shape)
Jeong-Won Kim fully grasped the challenges of contrasted glitter and shadow in James Wilson's Tree and Moon; he was the only player who seemed to have mastered the music of this test piece on its own terms.
Neither Taylor nor Kim have made it through to the finals. However, David Jalbert did, although he was a major semi-finals disappointment in Mussorgsky and Bartok; presumably he was carried through on the strength of his impressive earlier rounds.
Evgeny Sudbin is among those successful players who seem altogether more impressive for pianism than musicianship - Rachmaninov's Second Sonata is a loose enough piece without the extra elements of self-indulgence he brought to it.
Chiao-Ying Chang has been a lot more consistently interesting. She juxtaposed Bach and Shostakovich to good account, and followed up with a finely-etched but rather clinically breathless account of the second book of Debussy's Preludes. At 19, she's the youngest player in the field, highlighting one aspect of the jury's ongoing consistency: the average age has dropped round by round, from 24 at the start to under 21 in the finals.
The competition finals with the NSO under Alexander Anissimov take place at the NCH on Wednesday (David Jalbert in Brahms's First Concerto, Alexei Nabioulin in Prokofiev's Third, Evgeny Sudbin in Rachmaninov's Second) and Thursday (Lidija Bizjak in the Schumann, Chiao-Ying Chang in Chopin's Second, Kirill Gerstein in Brahms's First)
