He seems very serious but I don't like Fazioli
Video games and the Chopin Competition
If you’re around my age, there’s a good chance that a chunk of your childhood was spent watching other people play video games. There was often a living room or basement with four or five kids but only two controllers, a scarcity-based economy in miniature. I once took it for granted that it’s more fun to play than to watch, but this is no longer a foregone conclusion. As an adult who has met many current and former gamers, I’ve discovered that for many of them the watching is just as enjoyable as the playing — and sometimes even preferred. I’ve met people who didn’t grow up with game consoles in the house who still know where all the shortcuts are in Super Mario because they watched hundreds of playthroughs on YouTube, and I’ve met still more people who settle down on the sofa with a plate of dinner and, instead of watching the latest Netflix prestige drama, turn on twitch.tv and find someone streaming League of Legends or Minecraft or Ghosts n’ Goblins.
One of the features of the twitch.tv experience is the chat box that shows up next to the game, showing a stream of comments from viewers. If the stream is sufficiently popular, the chat stops being a record of people’s reactions to what they’re watching and turns into its own incomprehensible beast: it goes by so fast that nothing longer than a few words can really be understood, so the commenters start communicating by signals: big blocks of emojis, words in all-caps repeated ten or twenty times, or mass imitative copy-pastes to produce an effect somewhat analogous to doing “the wave” in a stadium. It might charitably be called impressionistic, a reflection of some collective id; I’ve met people who love it for its sheer, carnivalesque incomprehensibility.
Postmodern ideas about how the commentary about any work of art (or “text” if you want) is part of the thing itself, or even indelibly part of it, reach their full flower now. I assume there are many cultural studies grad students writing papers about twitch chats as we speak.
All this is to say that I spent a lot of time watching the Chopin Competition over the past week, it came with a live chat, and I had feelings about it.
The Chopin Competition is one of the top two or three most prestigious piano competitions in the world, and is the closest thing the classical music world has to the Olympic Games. It’s held every five years in Warsaw (this was officially the “2020” competition), the young competitors are skilled far beyond what most humans are capable of, and the stakes are high. Its past winners include a number of superstars. In particular the four gold medalists of the 60’s and 70’s (Pollini, Argerich, Ohlsson, Zimerman) are among the greatest in their generation, with many heavy hitters among the silver medalists as well (notably Vladimir Ashkenazy in 1955 and Mitsuko Uchida in 1970). A win is a career-launcher.
So, this makes it a potentially exciting thing for anyone with a love of classical piano to watch. However, it can also get repetitive: the competitors play only the music of Frederic Chopin, and while his repertoire is varied and deep, in the end there’s only so much of it. In particular, the last round requires all finalists to play one of Chopin’s piano concertos, of which he wrote only two.1
When I worked in a classical music institution, engagement was a word we threw around a lot: we needed more of it, ideally quality but mostly quantity, and we especially needed it from young people. The conventional wisdom was that concerts needed to be less stuffy, less aloof, more participatory. So what better way to engage the public than with a competition? It’s inherently more participatory: spectators get to pick a winner and root for them, and it doesn’t take as much specialized music education to have an opinion on whose performance you liked the best.
As it happens, the competition was conceived in order to engage the youth. In the words of its founder, Jerzy Żurawlew (from this article, via Wikipedia):
“Young people at that time, not long after the end of the Great War, were taking a keen interest in sports. They were dyed-in-the-wool realists in their outlook on life. I would often hear that Chopin was excessively romantic, that he enervated the soul and weakened the psyche. Some went so far as to discourage the inclusion of Chopin as required repertoire in music schools. All that showed a fundamental lack of understanding, which I found very painful... As I watched young people’s enthusiasm for sporting achievement, I finally hit upon a solution: a competition!”
This year’s competition was streamed in its entirety on YouTube and it’s the first time I can remember any classical music competition penetrating the public consciousness outside of specialized classical music circles (although it’s possible that I just wasn’t paying attention in 2015, which was also live-streamed). Watching it was an enormous pleasure. I certainly had my favorites, even though at that level the differences in their skill and artistry are so subtle that my amateur’s opinion is mostly irrelevant. Even the judges had a hard time deciding: after a deliberation that went two hours longer than scheduled, they gave awards to eight out of the twelve finalists, including two second-place winners and two fourth. I was happy that my compatriot Bruce (Xiaoyu) Liu won the big prize — well-deserved. You can admire his joyfulness and sensitivity in his concerto here, although I’ve seen some speculation that what really won it for him was the dazzling virtuosity on display in his third round performance of variations on La ci darem la mano (watch that one here, at the 36 minute mark).
But the oddest part of watching the live-streamed experience was the chat. Way back in the early days of social media I participated in a few “live chats” during opera broadcasts, and they were always very sparsely-populated and relatively genteel affairs. But this time — the twitch-style video game chat! I shouldn’t be surprised this far into the live-streaming era, but during every performance it cascaded down the screen, full of frog emojis and caps lock and comments:
FAZIOLI IS CHEAP PIANO
Jakub #1
The EU will collapse like the Soviet Union and Chopin will forever remind us of our duty and love
HE SEEMS VERY SERIOUS BUT I DON'T LIKE FAZIOLI
YES HE IS MUSICIAN
he is good but he's doing too many facial expressions
🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
mistaks he is loss
HE IS CHEATING 👎👎👎👎👎👎👎
belllisimo!!!!!!!!!!!! 🤗🤗🤗
Probably every event is like this now; why I would expect it to be any different in the Chopin competition, I don’t know. Out of a desire not to be distracted (and some vague sense of propriety) I kept the chat turned off, but often found myself turning it on again just to see: did anyone else hear that wrong note? What did people think of the Kawai piano? Usually I didn’t get my answer but kept staring at the stream in fascination. The chat could be hard to look away from. Perhaps after a decade of this it will be as natural as the cheering in a football game.
For a nice thematic wrap-up, I invite you to contemplate this particular stream, on twitch.tv itself: a guy streaming the competition while also playing Tetris. Maybe the bleeps and bloops do something for you, who knows. Engagement!
Some other miscellaneous Chopin Competition highlights and thoughts:
Beautiful performance of the less popular F-minor concerto by third prize winner Martin Garcià Garcià
I wonder if Franz Liszt would be furious if he knew that the most important piano competition is Chopin’s, not his.
Even worse, the decision on which of the two to play is lopsided. According to this article, over the past sixty years every single gold medalist, with one exception in 1980, has chosen the flashier E minor concerto over the arguably more beautiful F minor.