The clarity in his playing is absolutely amazing. It feels like you're gazing into a crystal clear pond and you can see the light shimmering all the way down the bottom.
Yeah, but what for? Who would want to spend his or her life playing music written by people who have been dead for a long time? Huge waste of time, if you ask me. This piece has already been amazingly played by many pianists before him, and you can easily find those performances on Spotify.
Isn't it insane how us normal folk slave over these passages just to get them up to tempo and sound passable, but these competition people just nail them like they're playing Grade 2 pieces.
@@neo968 I'm kind of being facetious, I'm sure it's difficult for them too, but they make it look easy. Eric Lu's probably spent days, weeks maybe practicing each page of that piece for hours on end.
This is mind-blowing. When pianists have the sheets in front of them, do they actually even read them? I can't fathom just following along in real-time. They must just be there for reference. I'm sure it's all stored as muscle memory.
Dude. You start learning a piece as if you were starting out playing the piano lol. You often start with one hand only (although I stopped doing it after about 8 years - in rare cases I saw the disadvantages of never having solely practiced each hand). You start out playing slowly (less than one note per second) and often with mistakes, you try to figure out the fingering (funny word), because it's very individual. This goes on for weeks, until you slowly ramp up the tempo, which comes naturally when getting more comfortable with playing the piece, but only if you have the proper technique to support it, of course. And even then: I personally started practicing pieces I knew very well at an extraordinarily slow tempo where I used a metronome at about 60 BPM... FOR EACH NOTE THAT I HIT. That is WAY more difficult than playing it fast, especially if doing so by heart (and doing so for each hand alone is literally impossible if you usually only play the piece with both hands), but nothing gives you as much control as doing that. When you can do that, you know that you know each note by heart and are not just following muscle memory, and your technique becomes 10x better, no joke (it shows you where your technique is off; where you play sloppily, often displayed as playing two notes in quick succession whereas they should be 1 second apart and you cannot control that, because is was burned into your mind while playing fast). BTW you CANNOT truly learn a piece WITHOUT ditching musical sheets entirely at some point. It comes 100% naturally if you spend enough time practicing, which will always be the case with a piece such as this. When I played this particular piece, the whole process took me 4 months of my free time, with 0 to 5 hours of practice per day, although when I played it, it was a LITTLE too early for me. A pianist can do it in 2 weeks at 8hrs/day.
Yes, I'd say once you get past the point of having to think about how you play the piece, that is when you are truly able to just use muscle memory while performing, all these performances even from an extremely qualified professional would take months to learn and play to a high standard.
As a lay man with absolutely no skill in the piano whatsoever, I can say (a) that's an extreme level of skill on display, but (b) I'm not the biggest fan of that piece, in terms of how it sounds. In my utterly unprofessional opinion, it seems like the sort of music that's been composed just for the purpose of being difficult to play while still being easy on the ears. My own craft is writing, and this reminds me of reading a story that's only memorable because the language was so complex that it was tedious to read, not because the content was engaging or interesting.
I have a few years experience on piano but no where near as good. But replying to say i agree with you. People are upset that he came 4th but I can see why. The piece while it’s difficult, didn’t offer much difference between sections of the piece. And too much repetition of ascending and descending scales.
i definitely get what you mean. while it's beyond impressive to be able to play this with accuracy... the music piece itself doesnt really move me or make me feel anything. that's the main problem ive had getting into classical music, alot of the times it feels like the composer was just trying to flex or something
I completely agree. This does not move me at all. If there was no camera on the hands I would find this quite boring to listen to. I feel like this is a pure waste of talent and hard work.
Just a note to clarify, the piece is a Etude, meaning that the main purpose of the piece is practicing a specific technical skill. (In this case fast runs, i guess) Storytelling isn't as important. You can still dislike it of course, this is just to clarify.
@Ok I don't think you fully understood what I meant. Yes, it can totally be used to flex on people and most of the times, it is. But the original Idea behind the piece is still to get better at specific techniques, which are then reused in more meaningful or "deeper" pieces.
He's a good pianist, but if you listen to Zlata Chochieva's masterclass on the Chopin Etudes you will see that the finger technique here hits you on the head a bit. Listen to hers and you won't believe the difference. One is a pianist at the service of music - of melody really - this playing is music at the service of the pianist. The sound production and colour from some of the Russian pianists (Dinova, Chichieva, Sokolov, Volodos) is unmatched. It's not about flying fingers - it's about music. (You need flying fingers, of course, but listen to those guys - they're transcendent).
That’s because these Russian pianists use a Russian piano technique where they rub the keys and pull, it makes every note strong and the sound easy to control, everything is even. I haven’t watched the videos you’re mentioning but I’m assuming that’s what they are doing.
@@yourlowlyfunctionaldumbass427 try here for one example (remove spaces - YT sometimes won't allow the literal link to be posted): youtube . com / watch?v = fcd7fvL68z4&t=977s
I had the pleasure of watching this young man the Chopin Concerto No. 1 as a substitute Martha Argerich. I'd be lying to say I was disappointed I couldn't hear Martha but this young man certainly filled most of her shoes.
With perfect technique having become commonplace these days, this is not how pianists should be judged. It's certainly not what competitions are looking for. You need to show the panel something that they rarely or never see, deep musicality. Heine said of Liszt that the technique was so perfect, the piano disappeared, leaving just the music. Lu got through the piece decently, but at the end, I knew no more about the etude than when he started.
what are these commenters saying he has zero emotion??... imo he is one of the most mature and thoughtful young pianists out there along with kate liu - also this piece is a technical exercise by nature and he plays it very beautifully
I don't know who won the first places and everything. But I noticed that in cases like this, not just in music but any kind of art at all really, it's *the most* common critique for asian performers. Honestly it feels like there is some kind of racial prejudice factor - asian performers often get accused of being emotionless and robotic, but personally I always resented that. It feels like just an excuse playing up to "Asians are robots who don't actually like music and can't comprehend it's depth like we westerners do" narrative. It's my personal opinion and I don't want to fight over it, just wanted to share an observation that I made after seeing things like this many times.
@@tameriz1280 "I'm just gonna throw this out there but iTs JuSt My OpInIoN so it's inherently true and cannot be disproven: Y'all are racist. I'm not actually trying to disprove any of your points so that I can base that hypothesis on anything, making this 3 paragraph comment pretty much useless but here I am."
@@47Mortuus agressive much? It's just an observation, chill. Asian performers get criticized for the lack of emotion far more than anything else as far as *I* noticed, never said it's some kind of universal fact, that's why I put all those "feels like, personally" etc.
@@tameriz1280 I've never seen that happen but I've seen the social phenomenon you represent, being virtue signaling nothing-sayers who guard everything the say with "it's my opinion" to avoid any kind of confrontration everywhere for the past 7 years or so.
Come on, is it really too much to ask crediting the composer, piece and pianist in the video and/or at least in the description? All that basic info is missing.
@@WangYiheng347 I'm aware of that, but how many people are going to click that link to find out? I think it's pretty sketchy to steal content from another channel, reframe it, and then be too lazy to even copy/paste the most basic information about the performance.
Ok, this is amazing. But I have to say that I am tired of clarity. That’s the only main goal of most pianists today and I prefer much more a Horowitz interpretation with dozens of wrong notes, or one of those crazy aggressive and dirty Richter live interpretations from Russia than just clarity.
I definitely agree with that!! Their performances are so good because you can feel that fiery soul of the music emanating from them. Horowitz, Richter, Cziffra, Pogolerich, Cliburn. You don't get that anymore nowadays. Clarity is nice, but sometimes it just makes the music lifeless.
Something cool to share; My piano teacher was in the same college class as Eric Lu and they talked to each other from time to time during classes. They both attended Baylor College of Music in Texas. Idk, thought that was pretty cool. 😅
piano competitions are such an anti art thing and romanticism compositions, that are alrd imature in a lot of senses, gets out of hand with the even more technocratic approach we get out of this culture.
_Everybody let us say goodbye to all our notions,_ _'cause it's not enough to say that we're humane when we're left behind,_ _it's too late to think that we can worship human emotions,_ _'cause we've already evolved into machines in our minds._
Whenever I see anything like this I instantly know it's Chopin or Liszt. Not because it's difficult but because it's the kind of difficult by a recognizable composer that normal audiences will know of. I wish other composers were represented. Something in the 20th/21st century would be nice.
virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity. Alexander Kantarow, winner of the Tchaikovsky competition plays it perfectly legato with little sustaining pedal, more slowly, and with meaning.
Chopin etudes sounds difficult, but they're pianistic. Some of the flashiest etudes are actually quite simple, while some of the more deceptively easy, are avoided like the plague in public performances by very prominent pianists. Étude Op. 10, No. 2 is one of them.
I play guitar and not piano, but the impression I got out of this was that this was a “play a million notes per second” type performance rather than “play with feel.” It’s cool and impressive to watch, but it’s not inspiring and moving to the audience.
Emperor:“Well, I mean occasionally it seems to have, how shall one say? [he stops in difficulty; turning to Orsini-Rosenberg] How shall one say, Director? ORSINI-ROSENBERG: Too many notes, Your Majesty? EMPEROR: Exactly. Very well put. Too many notes.
