Yet Another Lambiel Post

Fly free, young zebra

Stephane Lambiel recently performed at All That Skate Summer, reinforcing my belief that he is simply the greatest show skater on this planet right now.

If Stars on Ice in the US had any taste (or an ounce of business sense, for that matter) they would hire Mr. Lambiel to perform in their beleaguered tour. Actually, any skating show with any interest in audience retention should hire Mr. Lambiel. Although Mr. Lambiel could be magnificent when he was competing, he is absolutely sublime now that he is emancipated from the suffocating minutiae of CoP and the necessity of training triple axels. Mr. Lambiel's show programs are diverse in style and are clearly not the products of a couple hours of 'choreographing' over a few beers and smoke breaks. In fact, his programs single-handedly justify the entire existence of show programs by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to have show programs that contain difficult elements, show off skills unseen in competition programs and still manage to be entertaining. He actually PERFORMS and appears to be capable of bringing audiences to their knees at will (or at the very least, he is capable of awakening them from the stupor caused by enduring so many other programs consisting of 5928 crossovers and posing). As further proof of his superior abilities, Mr. Lambiel even makes Evanescence somewhat palatable, a near-impossible feat given all the highly embarrassing adolescent associations attached to the song Bring Me to Life:





 I thought I loved Mr. Lambiel best when he skates a proper barnburner like Let the Good Times Roll...



....but his much more restrained program to Rachmaninoff's Prelude No. 5 is utterly mesmerizing. Whereas many of Mr. Lambiel's previous show programs focused on pure exhilarating emotion and audience projection, Prelude No. 5 is cerebral and nuanced and a distillation of classical skating in its finest form. Whereas Mr. Lambiel could have easily rested on his laurels like so many others by recycling his most crowd-pleasing hits, the subtle power of Prelude No. 5 instead marks another notch in Mr. Lambiel's continuing evolution as a skater and artist despite his departure from the competitive ranks.