I am watching, on my television, Eric Lu’s Leeds Piano Competition performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4, a performance I earlier listened to on the radio. My impression from the radio was that this was a rather “private” performance, and somewhat more so than I think ideal. But the exact same performance, on TV, now seems, perhaps because the public nature of the event itself is inescapable, much less private than I had supposed from the radio. Every bit as good as I recall, but different. More assertive, more rhetorical, more like a Shakespeare soliloquy spoken out loud, and quite loudly, to a theatre audience than the same soliloquy done as a stream-of-consciousness interior thought process, perhaps also on the radio. Odd how the medium can have such an impact on the message.
I see from the Eric Lu website that this Beethoven concerto performance, together with two Chopin solo pieces that he played in earlier rounds, is now being made available on CD.
Now I am watching a Chinese guy play the Schumann concerto. And the contrast in how it comes across is exactly the same as with Lu’s Beethoven performance.