Van Cliburn Semifinals: Starikov, Johnson

Photos by Ralph Lauer and Brandon Wade

—Wayne Lee Gay

May 31 (afternoon): Israeli/Russian competitor Vitaly Starikov, 30, presented the complete second set of twelve Etudes in Chopin's Opus 25 to open Saturday's semifinal round. Throughout most of this notoriously difficult collection, he suffered a lack of balance, all too often allowing the main melody to be buried in the accompanying figures. He finally discovered and adequately emphasized a melody line in No. 5 in E minor, but continued to hold himself within a narrow dynamic range. Only in Number 11 in A minor, popularly nicknamed "Winter Wind," did Starikov create a uniformly strong presence—and in the closing No. 12 in C minor, nicknamed "The Ocean," the powerful melody line was inconsistent. 

In Liszt's transcription of Schubert's song "Du bist die ruh'," Starikov opened shyly and never rose completely to a meaningful emotional level. He seemed much more at home with Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata, finally turning up the volume in the stromy second theme of the first movement, and uncovering the smoldering emotion in the Andante caloroso of the second. In the Precipitato finale, he carefully husbanded his volume and demonstrated that here, at least, he owned a worthy technique.

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Canadian Carter Johnson, 28, demonstrated impressive breadth and emotional intelligence—a not-so-easy task in the eighteen movements of Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze. Here, Johnson achieved the double crown of appropriate passion and insight not only in each brief section but in the overall arc of this highly sectional work. 

Johnson was equally at home in Scriabin's Five Preludes from Opus 74, where Scriabin lands completely in the modern era with total dissonance and atonality. In a very different version of modernism, polytonal rather than atonal, Johnson  traveled the wide range of emotions and touches that ends in a grand, sonorous fugue in Hindemith's Piano Sonata No. 3.