Rachmaninoff - Prelude in D Major, Op. 23, No. 4
Rachmaninoff - Étude-tableau in B Minor, Op. 39, No. 4
Rachmaninoff - Prelude in E Minor, Op. 32, No. 4
Rachmaninoff - Prelude in B Minor, Op. 32, No. 10
Rachmaninoff - Prelude in G Minor, Op. 23, No. 5
Rachmaninoff - Étude-tableau in E-flat Minor, Op. 39, No. 5
Scriabin - Piano Sonata No. 10, Op. 70
Ligeti - Etude No. 3, "Touches bloquées"
Ligeti - No. 9, "Vertige"
Ligeti - Etude No. 1, "Désordre"
Prokofiev - Piano Sonata No. 8 in B-flat Major, Op. 84
"Gifted with mind-boggling technical skill, penetrating interpretive insight, and enough charisma to light a city, Yuja Wang is a megastar pianist. As the Los Angeles Times wrote, “She eats the world’s greatest keyboard challenges for breakfast with one hand tied behind her back.”
Review: Yuja Wang Plays Dazed Chaos, Then 7 Encores
Yuja Wang charting wholly dark, private emotions at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
The usual praise for a musician who plays a recital in a big hall is that he or she makes that big hall feel small.
But on Thursday, the pianist Yuja Wang made Carnegie Hall seem even vaster than normal: big, empty, lonely. Through her concert’s uncompromisingly grim first half and its wary, stunned second, Ms. Wang charted wholly dark, private emotions. She was in no way hostile toward an adoring (if slightly disoriented) audience, but neither did she seem at all interested in seducing it.
After the playbills had been printed, Ms. Wang — who will have a Perspectives series at Carnegie next season — revised her program. She subtracted two of the four Rachmaninoff preludes she’d planned to give before intermission and added an extra three of his later, even less scrutable Études-Tableaux. Ms. Wang played none of these pieces in a way that made them seem grounded or orderly; she even seemed to want to run the seven together in an unbroken, heady minor-key span, a choice that most — but not enough — of the audience respected by not clapping in between.
Even divided by light applause, these pieces blurred into and stretched toward one another. Doing nothing that felt exaggerated or overwrought, Ms. Wang emphasized unsettled harmonies and de-emphasized melodic integrity. The Étude-Tableau, in E-flat Minor (Op. 33, No. 6) wasn’t the juxtaposition of one hand’s abstraction and the other’s clear etching. No, she was telling two surreal tales at once. The martial opening of the Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23, No. 5) swiftly unraveled into something woozy and bewildering. The washes of sound in the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 39, No. 1) were set alongside insectlike fingerwork — neurotic, insistent, claustrophobic.
Her bending of the line in the Étude-Tableau in B Minor (Op. 39, No. 4) felt like the turning of a widening gyre, infusing the evocation of aristocratic nostalgia with anxiety. (Rachmaninoff composed most of the works Ms. Wang played as World War I loomed and unfolded, and the 19th century finally ended.) The stretched-out, washed-out quality of melancholy in her account of the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 33, No. 3), made that sorrow seem more like resignation: The loneliness she depicted felt familiar to her, even comfortable.
The prevailing mood — dreamlike sadness; a feeling of being lost; rushing through darkness — continued in what followed. The relentless trills and tremolos of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 10 — which is sometimes played lusciously but was here diffuse and gauzy — glittered angrily. Three Ligeti etudes from the 1980s and ’90s proved that Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as she presented them, were presentiments of the modernism of the distant future.
There was the sense that more time than just 20 minutes — decades, perhaps — had elapsed during intermission, after which Ms. Wang played Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 8, composed during World War II. Here, playing with guarded poise, Ms. Wang seemed to inhabit a kind of aftermath of the dazed chaos she had depicted in the early-20th-century works on the first half. The contours were sharper now, the colors brighter and bolder. The effect was still unnerving.
I considered whether Ms. Wang’s flamboyant clothes — in the first half, a floor-length purple gown with only a slash of sparkle covering her breasts; in the second, a tiny iridescent turquoise dress with vertiginous heels — were the right costume here. They did give the impression that she had arrived alone, a disconcerting combination of powerful and vulnerable, at a not particularly appealing party. In that sense they were a fitting complement to her ominous vision of this music.
Likewise, it seemed at first that a few of her seven — yes, seven — encores jarred with the forlorn mood she’d built up. Vladimir Horowitz’s “Carmen” fantasia, an Art Tatum stride version of “Tea for Two,” a demented arrangement of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” — all were blazingly performed but had a touch of cheerful kitsch about them. But perhaps they, too, were of a piece with the intoxication that permeated the recital.
And by the end, as she followed the “Mélodie” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” with Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Ms. Wang finally seemed to have found a measure of real, hard-earned peace.
Yuja Wang Performed Thursday at Carnegie Hall.
SERGEI RACHMANINOFFSelected Preludes and Études-tableaux
Rachmaninoff modeled his solo piano preludes on Chopin’s contribution to the genre. Dating from the first decade of the 20th century, the preludes of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 23 and Op. 32 display his trademark blend of Russian-flavored lyricism and dazzling virtuosity. The later Op. 39 Études-tableaux (Pictorial Etudes) are conceived on a larger and more complex scale.
ALEXANDER SCRIABINPiano Sonata No. 10, Op. 70
Scriabin began his career as a Romantic composer-pianist in the Lisztian mold and ended it as a proto-Modernist. The last of his 10 piano sonatas is suffused with an aura of otherworldliness and caprice, in keeping with the improvisational quality that a contemporary critic detected in his playing: “It seemed as if he was creating a piece that you know well from a printed score right there on the stage in front of the piano.”
GYÖRGY LIGETIThree Etudes
Insatiably curious and constitutionally incapable of falling into a rut, Hungarian composer György Ligeti continually reinvented his musical language over the course of his life. He once said that “all cultures, indeed the whole wide world is the material of art!” Ligeti’s adventurous exploration of rhythms, harmonies, and textures is evident in the three short, technically demanding etudes we hear on this evening’s program.
SERGEI PROKOFIEVPiano Sonata No. 8 in B-flat Major, Op. 84
Prokofiev composed his three so-called “war sonatas,” nos. 6–8, more or less simultaneously between 1939 and 1944. All three works were marked by his experience of the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War,” but the Sonata in B-flat Major is far from militaristic in spirit. The dreamily romantic character of the first two movements may reflect the composer’s love for Mira Mendelson, the ambitious young writer who would become his second wife in 1948.
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