The commentary on the Jackson video is too intrusive for me to be able to hear the music and evaluate how well the skater interprets it.
The Cranston one is great for this purpose since there's no commentary over the music.
Interpretation criteria for singles skaters:
*Effortless movement in time to the music (timing)
*Expression of the music's style, character and rhythm
*Use of finesse to reflect the nuances of the music
Allowing for the possibility that the audio and video are not perfectly synched on the youtube clip...
My general comment is that often the movement was right on the music, note for note, beat by beat.
Occasionally, especially in the opening section, it followed the general mood and style, even the forward momentum, of the musical line, but the downbeats or phrasing of the movement didn't match up with the downbeats and phrasing of the music -- a new phrase might start where Cranston was still in the middle of a spin or the previous movement phrase, or he'd start a new movement phrase before the musical phrase had concluded.
A few times, the music was doing something interesting and Cranston was just taking a few strokes in his own rhythm.
He was really into this performance physically, really over his skates and put a lot of energy into it throughout. Although my first thought isn't "wow that looks effortless," I never felt that it was labored or effortful -- I'd give good credit for the "effortless movement" part of the first bullet point and note that the "in time to the music part" was usually quite good.
The movement style for each section of the program matched the style of the music very well. He hit a lot of big accents in the music with big gestures or jumps, although there was one musical flourish early on that seemed to call for an arm or leg gesture and was pretty much ignored.
He hit the beginnings and endings of larger sections very clearly.
There were a lot of nuances of movement matching musical nuances, including some spin entries and position changes. I especially enjoyed the way the butterfly-knee spin at the very end went with the music. But that made the few missed opportunities perhaps more disappointing than with a skater from whom I would expect less.
All in all, I'm thinking that the expression of the idea of each musical section was Outstanding, but because of a few lapses in rhythm and a few missed nuances I'd consider those aspects only Very Good. Credit for choosing music that demands precision and living up to it so often. So I might go with an Interpretation score in the 9.0 range.
? Because TES is I think his total max for this layout
