Day 14 - Concerto Final II

The competition is over -the results are announced. The rest of the finalists played today wih the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under a fantastic -and very careful- Leif Segerstam. It was the turn of Irina Zahharenkova with Chopin's 1st, followed by Marko Mustonen with Tchaikovsky 1st. After the intermission Sofya Gulyak closed this competition with Rachmaninov 3rd.

Irina was again on a very high level -though not her best performance in this competition; I guess that was what brought her just the 6th prize. If anyone at all, she deserved a better prize -considering all 3 rounds; which is self-evident to me in an international competition. It was interesting to hear different opinions -from love to hate- about her concerto performance.

Marko chose -or it just happened?- to show the virtuoso side of the work more than the rest. Brilliant octaves and iron nerves in a small difficult situation. Not as impressive as Roope -they played the same concerto, a direct comparison is inevitable... I think that in his case the concerto performance played a role...

Sofya would be the crucial factor of this final -I expected it, and it turned out to be this way. The concerto went great in my opinion, and I believe this work to be quite hard to play live with an orchestra with just one rehearsal. Not everything went perfect, some things probably because of the choice of tempo -her choice?-, while the orchestra somehow decided to come out a bit more in this piece: weird, since many orchestra solos were lost in the other concertos... But again, this time there were groups of instruments not solo ones.

So, Sofya won (and got a special prize for the commissioned work), Roope got the second, Violetta the third (with a no-winner-concerto -but then she won the hearts of many listeners and viewers!), Marko was fourth, Yoonjung fifth, and Irina sixth. Two Finnish pianists, Sonja Fräki and Maija Väisänen, were awarded a special prize for their performance of a Finnish work in the first round (the work composed after 1960 in the rules). Congratulations to everybody!

My thanks publicly too, to Anna Krohn, and the staff at the office Annica Lönnqvist, Elisa Järvi, Tove Djupsjöbacka and Sirpa Helin. You helped the lives of many a competitor.

I'm stopping this blog -I'll continue in my two own blogs, here and here. The first is about matters and problems in the classical music globally -thus in Finland too, the second focuses on the Greek classical music -promotion of it and its problems. Welcome there!

Cheers!

Thursday June 7th late, no actually it's already Friday the 8th...