RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
Yuja Wang - Piano


Brahms - Ballade in D Minor, Op. 10, No. 1
Brahms - Ballade in D Major, Op. 10, No. 2
Schumann - Kreisleriana, Op. 16
Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier"


"With impeccable technique and tremendous musical sensitivity, few artists generate as much electricity as Yuja Wang. The New Criterion wrote of her playing, “crystalline, sensitive, and musical … utterly composed, with hands and mind in balance.” She returns to Carnegie Hall for a recital you simply cannot miss."

Compare Yuja Wang's program with Murray Perahia's we heard last Sunday, May 8th.  Both are playing two different Brahms pieces and both are playing the Beethoven "Hammerklavier".  Lots of "big music".


JOHANNES BRAHMS Ballade in D Minor, Op. 10, No. 1; Ballade in D Major, Op. 10, No. 2
Brahms, like Schumann, had a strong affinity to the characteristically Romantic genre of the short instrumental character piece. The closely related tonalities and motivic kinship of these two early ballades suggest that they were intended to be heard as a pair. The grim D-Minor Ballade was inspired by “Edward,” a traditional Scottish ballad about a son who murders his father, while its D-major companion evokes a more wistful mood.



ROBERT SCHUMANN Kreisleriana, Op. 16

German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who created the memorable character of the half-crazed Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, was Schumann’s soulmate and literary counterpart. Kreisleriana pays homage to its namesake in the form of eight fantasy-like pieces that also reflect the contrasting personalities of the composer’s fictional alter egos: the impulsive Florestan and the dreamy Eusebius.



LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”

This monumental—and notoriously difficult—sonata marked a watershed in Beethoven’s artistic development. With its soaring rhetoric and penetrating introspection, the “Hammerklavier” anticipates the musical language of the composer’s so-called late period. The centerpiece of the work is the intensely ruminative Adagio sostenuto, which German critic Paul Bekker famously called “the apotheosis of pain, of that deep sorrow for which there is no remedy, and which finds expression not in passionate outpourings, but in the immeasurable stillness of utter woe.”