Gonzales

It's a good thing most of the audience was on mushrooms, because if you weren't, Gonzales's "spectacle d'orgue" was a major letdown after last year's spellbinding solo piano performance. Let loose on the gargantuan pipe organ inside the magnificent Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste, Gonzales was much hammier than he had to be. Interspersed amongst moments of beauty were joke-y covers that made him more of an attention magnet than a virtuoso. Occasionally these choices were subversive – hearing a Jewish man play "King of Pain" in a Catholic church, for example – but there's really no excuse for playing the Jeopardy theme. It didn't help that the majority of the audience had their back to the pipe organ and had to watch a video feed, or that Gonzales was uncharacteristically non-conversant. The real star of the show was the pipe organ itself, the sheer physicality of which overshadowed anything Gonzales did.