I watched Ilia Yuma and Adam.
For Adam, the long program makes sense with the SP... with the artwork reveal. I cannot say much about it because he was not having a good day so it was hard to watch him fall heavily at the beginning. I saw some really nice moments with the music but I will wait to see what he does when he skates it better.
Ilia, oh lord. I am guessing it's his voice for voiceovers ??? It felt pretentious to me, just my opinion of course, but moreover, I felt like he was paying more attention to the words rather than the musical line. Granted the music is quite empty but it was distracting me. I am a musician so "word painting" is something I am aware of. It's when a composer reflects musically the text and sets it in a way that works both with the meaning of the words and the musical line. The danger for a performer is to lose track of the bigger picture : the greater musical line, and get themselves lost in the small details of the text setting. I felt Ilia did exactly that in there. I was happy to see him do his step sequence earlier in the LP than what I remember him doing in some other programs. I was happy to see him do steps on slower music to. I was ready for the flow and the gliding that this type of step sequence normally gives us... but the flow was often interrupted by choreographic movements, mostly arms, to the words. I didn't like that at all, as you can tell by the entire paragraph I wrote about it. What I did like is that he did refine his backflip, the one foot landing is nice. The knee slide was not good. And what was really fun to watch is that he did include the raspberry twist within a spin itself. Now, that's cool. Yes, he is a crazy acrobatic kind of guy, and kudos to him to bring in some new cool moves. I had never seen that before, so to me it's new... someone can enlighten me if someone else did include that variation before.
Yuma : he has my favourite LP of the 3. Sure, it's so conventional. But to me, this is what pure and beautiful figure skating is. I adored his Nessun Dorma program, and also, he didn't pick the aria (solo) and to me, that's a good choice as the choir is less intrusive in the skating than a tenor pushing high notes. Yuma also has the most beautiful combo of the evening with his triple flip triple loop. That thing was beauty ! It looked like hops and it was so lightly done. Wow.... Virtuoso material ( Ilia comes second for his 4s 3a sequence which was also very nice but for other reasons, power being one of them) Yuma's step sequence was so good !
My take on this is that all 3 are bringing different things to skating. I am more impressed with Yuma because that's the kind of skating I have been watching and loving for years. Pure beauty and flow, which is unfortunately not the focus these days.
I like Adam and clearly, his programs are story-telling and will be memorable. For good and bad reasons
Ilia skated a watered down content today but that is still enough to win. However, in terms of choreography, it's weak in my opinion. I'd scrap the entire program and start over again. He has had better material before. Again, props to him for exploring new ideas but this one doesn't work for me.
congratulations to the top five, and also to me.
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