Yuja Wang Recital

Well, my friend who decided to pass on this recital because “I’m not a fan of any of these composers” missed out big time. I just got back from Yuja Wang’s recital at Herbst Theatre. I left the theatre in complete awe of her nimble fingers and technical prowess, not to mention the fact that she played quite a challenging program entirely from memory.

During the first half, she played two etudes by Ligeti and the B-minor sonata by Franz Liszt. The Liszt piece is quite long and complicated; I was quite overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the piece—its multiple themes, the dynamic ranges, etc. I won’t bother to try and analyze it since I couldn’t possibly do this piece justice with my limited music knowledge. I mean, take a look at the score.

Wang’s deft fingers literally flew from one end of the keyboard to the other.

I sat transfixed for most of it, but found the piece a challenge to listen to; my mind kept wandering and was unable to keep up with the tempo of the piece, just because the themes kept hurling at me full-speed, before I had the chance to digest and process the previous theme. This is one of these pieces that I will probably have to hear a dozen more times before I “get” it. The program notes didn't do justice to the complexity of the piece.

The second half, with sonatas by Bartok and Scriabin and Ravel’s La Valse, was also played with technical perfection as was the first half, but much easier for me to process, and thus, for me, the better of the two halves. For example, while I can only remember broad themes from Liszt’s sonata, I have distinct memories of passages and notes from the second half. If I sat through most of the first half in a trance mesmerized by Wang’s finger calisthenics, in the second half, I had a more visceral reaction to the music—similar to the reaction I had when I listened to a Gilels recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata. (More on this later.) Not to sound clichéd, but when she played the delicate passages of the Scriabin Sonata #2, my heart felt like it was being tugged by an invisible string connected to the piano. The best metaphor I can give to describe how delicate those notes sounded is to say that it sounded like a piece of thin diaphanous fine-gauge silk floating in the wind and catching the sun’s rays and sparkling here and there like jewels at key moments. Or maybe that faint summer breeze that caresses your arm for a fleeting moment on an otherwise balmy day. In the quietest passages, she played the notes so delicately, yet smoothly, that it did not sound at all like distinct keys being struck on a piano, but rather, more like the seamless sound of a harp. The notes had an ethereal quality to them. Sound seemed to emanate not from the keys but seemed to hover slightly above her fingers, similar to that faint summer breeze hovering over your arm.

But how to possibly describe this using only words? By labeling it ___ (delicate, sensitive, ethereal etc.), I’m already giving it more substance than its delicate form warrants.

At one point, (probably to the annoyance of the people sitting in front of me,) I couldn’t help but exclaim (in a whisper), “wow. . .” I think I might’ve forgotten to breathe several times. Several excerpts from La Valse gave me goose bumps.

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While I hung on the edge of my seat—entranced, mesmerized, in awe, and at times, forgetting to breathe, the guy (whom I originally sat next to, but then moved away from, b/c his snoring was driving me nuts) who sat in the row behind me slept through most of the first half as well as part of the second half. I thought I was a “tolerant” audience member, but I think I am more of an audience nazi than I give myself credit for. I now have a new “least favorite audience annoyance”: light snoring/heavy breathing that lasts the duration of the entire concert. I’ll take coughing and rustling of candy wrappers over this any day. Not only did this man reek of cigarette smoke, but I could hear his heavy breathing throughout the entire program. His wife, who sat next to him, did not once nudge him or attempt to rectify this transgressive behavior. (Didn’t she find the ostinato of his heavy breathing utterly aggravating?!?!?!?) I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt (maybe he had a hellish night and didn’t sleep?), but the more I tried to ignore him, the more my mind kept focusing on his audible-from-10-seats-away heavy breathing.

I certainly didn’t let the heavily breathing man ruin the concert for me, but I couldn’t help but wonder why he bothered staying for the second half if the first half clearly bored him to sleep.

Here are some other reviews by people who are clearly more versed in the repertoire than I am:

One not as gushy as mine in San Francisco Classical Voice
Another review which comments on her post-performance mannerisms, also in San Francisco Classical Voice
and a raving one by Joshua Kosman.