It’s funny, this is the second time I’ve forgotten about Piano no Mori during its airing. That can happen with series that aren’t released on a regular schedule, especially when things are really busy (both here and in RL). At this point the finale has been released too, and I really should have just covered both episodes in a single post – but I just didn’t have the time. I suppose I at least get the benefit of a little suspense this way, if I’m looking for silver linings.
Kai’s performance wraps up early on, with a notable flourish (he plays right to the end rather than leaving it to the orchestra as the score directs – which kind of irritates me). I LOL’d a little that this is what Shuuhei is reduced to in the narrative – a literal face in the crowd as Kai reflects on all the people who’ve supported him. It’s amazing how much I’ve come to root against Kai given that he really is quite a nice person – I guess that’s a credit to just how ingratiatingly his character is written. It really is too bad.
As for Lech, we did get the answer to the last question I posed in my review of Episode 22 – his performance certainly wasn’t a total disaster. That makes him a serious contender to win, though he did drift a bit in the second movement when Emilia showed up and he couldn’t stop crying. If Pang’s performance was bittersweet and Kai’s was brash and virtuosic, Lech’s was jaunty – it really did sound like a dance, which somehow made the #1 feel more “Chopin” than it usually does to me. I do wonder sometimes how much we think we can hear the state of the mind of pianists in their performance is just projection on our part, especially with a fictional setting like this – but to hear the performances back to back was undeniably interesting.
As for the judging, that seems as if it’s going to be a full-on clusterfuck. Karol’s friend Szymon shows up and basically threatens the chairman of the judging panel by showing him the results of an “unbiased” panel of expert pianists he’s commissioned for his paper. He extracts a promise that the scores of the judges will be published, which they’re naturally horrified about. We also have the Chinese mafia threatening the corrupt Polish judge if things don’t go Pang’s Wei (sorry, couldn’t help myself). I’m confident that the real judging at the Chopin doesn’t get quite this absurd, though there is a how the sausage is made quality to this – it’s a reminder that these competitions always exist under a cloud of suspicion of bias. We’ll see what happens in the finale (which I’ll try to get to in the next few days).
