Olga? Kozlova took a deep breath, glanced at the piano, which was only a little more than ten meters away from her, gently lifted the skirt of her dark purple evening dress, and walked onto the stage.

A graduate of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, she is Chinese New Year's Eve one year old and has spent six years in her professional piano career. Four years ago, when she stood on this stage for the first time, she was only less than two points away from the first place, and she was the runner-up. Four years later, she has experienced dozens of concerts and competitions, and is more mature than four years ago. As a dream in her professional pianist career, Erga? Kozlova is determined to win the Masters Cup, even though she will face tough opponents!

As a pianist, especially a pianist who has a certain reputation in the world, he has a strong pride. The so-called "literature is the first and there is no second", art and literature have something in common, but all artists who have a certain status on the international stage will not admit that they are inferior to others in the field they are best at.

Kozlova has long blond hair, cream-like skin peculiar to the Belarusian nation, and although her figure is slightly fat, she has a plump beauty and a very good appearance.

Walking to the piano, she first bowed twice in the direction of the judges and the audience, and then pulled out the piano bench and sat in front of the piano.

Although she was ranked first and had a bit of a disadvantage in terms of position, Kozlova didn't care. In this kind of professional competition, the impact of ranking on results is minimal. After all, these judges are extremely professional judges, and the results they give are extremely authoritative and fair. It will not be affected by the order in which the players play.

After sitting down at the piano and adjusting her breathing slightly, Kozlova stretched out her hands onto the piano.

After a short pause. The left hand rises and falls slightly on the keys, bringing up a string of cramped chords.

Liszt's work, Mephistopheles Waltz.

This is a very dramatic, uneasy and tense atmosphere, and it is also a very representative piece of Liszt's piano virtuosity. Although it is not so familiar to the ears of the general public and piano beginners, almost every professional pianist knows this piece.

Mephistopheles is the devil in Goethe's play Faust. Throughout the work, this image is depicted and portrayed with sharp dissonance chords, contrasts between the strength and weakness of movement and stillness. To the ears of ordinary people, this kind of work may be very different from the aesthetic in the usual sense. Because this kind of abstract, narrative music always feels a little strange. However, the requirements for skill in the process of performance are quite high. In other words, it's a piece of pure showmanship.

Quarter-finals require players to play for no more than 35 minutes. The repertoire to be played contains at least one piece of the prescribed repertoire. This Mephistopheles Waltz is one of the prescribed pieces.

Kozlova is very skilled in playing skills. Her hands are flexibly attached to the key surface, every rise and fall is very light, and the legato, pause, and skip are very well grasped, and she plays this piece that needs to use "time" to express the musical image of xiàn, and plays it perfectly.

Chu Yang, along with many contestants, sat in the waiting room specially provided by the organizer for the contestants. The quarterfinals take three days. Chu Yang did not have a game schedule today, and he could rest in the hotel as required, but he still came to the scene. He wanted to take a look. Is there anyone in this class who is particularly good at meeting his standards? It can also be regarded as discovering "talents" in advance for the future formation of Leshenmen.

Here I want to talk about Chu Yang's criteria for choosing musicians. In Chu Yang's view, it is not that the more famous and skilled musicians are, the more suitable they are for the selection criteria of the Leshenmen. He looks at a musician, and more importantly, at his potential suzhì, which is popularly said to be the "feeling" of music. Chu Yang felt that for the Yin monks, whether they had "spirituality" and whether they had a "happy heart" were the most important. Many musicians have achieved great fame, but in Chu Yang's view, what he sees is that they have stiffened their thinking, lack of enthusiasm and sensitive perception of music itself, even if such a person is famous, if he turns to the road of music cultivation, he is destined not to achieve high achievements.

This is most obvious in the current Chinese pop music scene. Chu Yang saw that many young singers and artists became popular with one or two songs, and then participated in shows, filming, etc., everywhere, which seemed to be very popular, but it can be seen from their music works that their feelings and understanding of music are shallow. Such a person is like a pool of turbid stagnant water, which looks unfathomable and very bluffing, but in fact, in the eyes of those who really know how to do it, they are shallow and unbearable.

Not far from Chu Yang's side, sat Lang Lang and another Chinese female player, named Du Jing, who had also participated in the Liszt Masters Cup, but the latter had not achieved a place, and this time it was estimated that she wanted to fight again.

Both of them have a game assignment this morning, and they are both scheduled for the morning. There were a total of six players in Huaxia participating in the competition this time, and Chu Yang had met with them all at a small meeting before the game, but except for Lang Lang, Chu Yang was not very familiar with the others. This can only be said that Chu Yang really didn't pay much attention to the professional piano circle before.

Like this contestant named Du Jing, Chu Yang only knew about it through the introduction of Guò Lang Lang, she is now a piano soloist in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and at the same time teaches at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, she is thirty-four years old this year, and her professional piano career has been more than ten years. In China, it is between a first-class pianist and a second-rate pianist. She came to participate in the Liszt Masters Cup, not like Lang Lang and herself, who was specially recommended by someone, but participated in the international selection tournament through guò and came in after passing all the way.

In fact, to be able to stand out in such a fierce selection competition, its own level and strength will not be bad, but Du Jing is not well-known in the international piano world, which has to be said to be a sadness in the piano world. The stage is so big, and there are so many "stars". But pianists with excellent skills and strength have grabbed a lot of them. If you want to stand out from the crowd, it is not easy to transition from "first-class" to "top", in addition to having technology and strength. It also takes a little bit of personality and luck. Just like Lang Lang, it's hard to say whether his exaggerated playing method is good or bad, but there is no doubt that this kind of playing is very peculiar and "eye-catching". And that's one of the factors in his success. If you talk about technique, when it comes to hard work, he does it, but there are undoubtedly too many pianists who work as hard as he does. There are even people who work harder than him, but they are obscure, just because they lack something personal. There are also opportunities.

And an international authoritative competition like this is an opportunity for all piano players. Getting a good ranking in such a competition has invisibly increased your value. The value has increased. There will be more opportunities to perform. There will be a broader stage, and it is possible to become a "star" and "master" in the piano world. This is a necessary path, although many piano educators feel that too many competitions are not a good thing for the players, because they focus on the competition process and rankings, and lose attention to the music itself. But despite what they say, take part in the competition and get the rankings. Gaining prestige is still the only way for most pianists to get ahead!

Chu Yang didn't chat with Lang Lang and Du Jing. He watched intently as the Russian female pianist played. Her playing is undoubtedly very standard, and she is very sophisticated, and she can't fault any of them. Chu Yang is very familiar with the score of this "Mephistopheles Waltz", and it can be said that any bit of detail on the score has been treated very standardly under her hands.

But it is this ubiquitous "standard" that makes the music itself like a commodity on the assembly line, and it becomes featureless. If it is measured by Chu Yang's standard, it is the lack of soul.

A piano work, or any other piece of music, is an expression of the composer's own thoughts. This thought can be positive or negative, happy or sad, angry, or mysterious...... These feelings xù, the length of the voice, the strength and weakness of the discontinuity and other means to express xiàn out. As a performer, you need to use instruments to understand and reproduce the emotions that the author created at that time, and through various superficial techniques, to dig out the most profound things in the music, this is the ensemble performer.

And further, it is to integrate one's own thoughts into this so-called "musical soul" and make it a "living" thing. For the Monk of Music, if you can't do this, you will never be able to step into the door of the real music path!

And having done this step does not represent a real entry, because everyone's thinking is also deep and shallow, good and bad. The level of your ideological realm directly determines how well you understand music and what kind of process you can sublimate it to. And the realm of the power of the divine soul is a specific measure.

If you measure it by the hardware standard of the computer, you will understand the system very well. For example, for example, the understanding of a musical work is an equation that solves pi, and of course the more decimal places you get, the more accurate your understanding will be, which is the premise. Under this premise, the more powerful the computing power, the more digits are calculated, if the power of the divine soul in the Qi refining period is compared to a hardware computing system composed of a pen and paper abacus, the foundation builder is a calculator, and in the Jindan period, it is upgraded to a computer, followed by a server, and a supercomputer......

Therefore, the improvement of the level of divine soul power does not mean that the level of understanding of music is higher, but it provides a possibility for understanding to a higher level, a kind of "hardware" support.

The music of Mephistopheles Waltz continues, and it has been played for more than ten minutes, and it is gradually coming to an end. Chu Yang was a little bored listening to the whole piece, like this, except for the skills, he couldn't hear a little understanding of the work itself, he really couldn't arouse his interest.

After the first piece, the female pianist from Russia did not get up, and no one applauded below, because everyone knew that her performance was not over.

Each person has no more than thirty-five minutes to play, and in such a time period, about three or four pieces can be played per person, maybe more if it's a short piece or something, but the average player doesn't choose that because they have to make sure that there is a piece that is long enough and has enough weight to show their skill during this time.

The general way of thinking is this: first play a prescribed piece, which takes about one-third to a quarter of the total time, and then play a shorter self-selected piece, usually from the super-practice. The next step is to choose a longer solo piece.

In this kind of quarter-finals, every player cherishes every minute of playing, because the quarter-finals are a knockout system, and one game is won or lost, and if you are out, you will lose the opportunity to continue the game.

Kozlova was well timed, and at thirty-four minutes, she finished playing her last piece. Standing up from the piano, the audience immediately burst into warm applause.

The results were scored on the spot, on a 100-point scale, and after the score was scored on the spot, Kozlova bowed again, then turned and walked off the stage. Her results were not bad, with the judges giving scores between 94 and 96, which is not an absolute high score, but it is a fairly competitive score that greatly improves her chances of reaching the semi-finals.

The second player on the stage was a male player from the island country, named Ichiro Okada, who was short in stature and had curly hair similar to Seiji Ozawa, the famous conductor of the island country. His hands are also relatively small, and they don't look like they are suitable for playing the piano, but his playing style is very flexible and light, which makes up for his innate shortcomings.

The first piece he played was Memories of the Puritans (Bellini), which was also a very obscure piece with the same narrative overtones. It seems that many contestants who participate in this kind of competition like to choose this kind of unpopular work. In fact, there is also a psychological game in this. After all, the contestants are not familiar with the obscure works, and the judges are not familiar with them, even if they have heard them, they have not done in-depth and specific analysis, unlike works such as "Bell", "Hungarian Rhapsody", "Ghost Fire", "Hunting", "Chasing Snow" and other works, which have been quickly analyzed and rotten. There is nothing wrong with the performance, and any small shortcomings are keenly captured and then infinitely magnified.

Ichiro Okada's performance was decent and didn't make a big impression. After his performance, two more players from the United States and Germany took the stage, and halfway through the morning competition, it was finally Lang Lang's turn. Hearing the host report his name, Lang Lang stood up, turned to look at Chu Yang and said with a smile: "I'm going!" ”

"Yes, come on!" Chu Yang nodded at him and stretched out his thumb to compare with him.

Lang Lang straightened out his black dress with shiny small discs, turned around and walked briskly towards the arena! (To be continued......)