Photos by Carolyn Cruz
This is an extraordinary week for free streaming of two major international piano contests: live concerts from the Van Cliburn finals and podcasts of the just concluded Queen Elisabeth International in Brussels.
Of the latter, watch the entire concert of grand prize winner Boris Giltburg. It includes Beethoven's Sonata No. 27 in E Minor Op. 90, Michel Petrossian's In the Wake of Ea, and Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3; and the National Orchestra of Belgium conducted by Marin Alsop.
The other five top winners' concerts are also available; they are Rémi Geniet, Mateusz Borowiak, Stanislav Khristenko, Zhang Zuo, and Andrew Tyson.
Upcoming live streaming features are the laureates' concert on June 13 and the closing concert on June 17, with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic, Edo de Waart conducting.
The 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition finals from Fort Worth are seen and heard through June 9.
From Barnard to Hollywood to Texas, one of my favorite music documentarians, Lori Miller, is following up her splendid They Came to Play with her production of the concert telecasts. Miller says she is very excited about, "Canon lending us their newest cameras (C300s), so we are really going for some great images." She continues:
We are running our competitor ID cards that the director and editor came up with. There are a lot of short films and profiles trying to show the personalities and humanity of the competitors. Right now they are posted on the on demand section of the Cliburn site, and looped in with the day's content rather than separately by competitor.We are also going for the best image quality, camera operators, etc. Our DP is famous for getting an award for the best shot of the century. We are going for this on the webcast.
(She's referring to cinematographer Larry McConkey, "master of the long shot," such as the scene entering the Copacabana in Good Fellas, most acclaimed in Hollywood. McConkey's long list of credits include Kill Bill 1 & 2, Hugo, The Good Shepherd, Silence of the Lambs, Vanilla Sky, Django Unchained, many, many more. Miller's Director of Photography at the Cliburn holds the Lifetime Achievement Award and Best Historical Shot Award from the Society of Camera Operators.)
Going to the main website, you "land" on the live telecast. Navigate to the "cards" Miller mentioned at the competitors' information. Get the performance schedule to see the days and times of upcoming concerts. And enjoy the view through the C300s.
The Cliburn semifinalists are:
Nikita Abrosimov, 24, Russia Sean Chen, 24, United States Alexey Chernov, 30, Russia Alessandro Deljavan, 26, Italy Fei-Fei Dong, 22, China Jayson Gillham, 26, Australia/United Kingdom Claire Huangci, 23, United States Vadym Kholodenko, 26, Ukraine Nikolay Khozyainov, 20, Russia Nikita Mndoyants, 24, Russia Beatrice Rana, 20, Italy Tomoki Sakata, 19, Japan