Yuja Wang began with eight selections from Shostakovich’s cycles Opuses 34 & 87 blended into a continuous whole, creating dreamy auras, sweet melodies, dance-like passages, and a march, all decorated with shimmering figures, trills and dazzling passagework. Interposed among the Opus 34 choices, a Prelude from Opus 87 (without its Fugue) exemplified the composer’s wit, pairing a propulsive theme with persistent left-hand beats and galloping dissonant chords. Wang concluded with the fifteenth Prelude and Fugue from Opus 87, the Prelude featuring swirling figures ornamenting the left-hand’s forceful melodic line, a soft, rather metronomic interlude, and a dance-like ending. The Fugue was brilliant, its multiple percussive voices interacting in incredibly rapid succession.
Next came a marvelously idiomatic performance of Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata, which successfully blends classical forms with mid-twentieth-century harmonies and rhythms. In the first movement, Wang sustained the persistent initial motif as it underwent Barber’s fascinating array of harmonic, dynamic and rhythmic variations. The Allegro vivace was a short but merry scherzo, with Wang’s delicately rollicking figures dancing above the triple-meter bass line provided by her left hand. In the emotionally impactful Adagio, Wang allowed the opening theme to emerge slowly, build up with gradually strengthening chords, and ultimately complete its arc with soft and deep tones. The concluding fugue was a tour de force, as Wang took its jazzy syncopated theme through Barber’s intricate counterpoint, maintaining a fine balance between bass chords and rapid figurations above, finally returning to the Sonata’s home tonality in a sparkling coda.
Following intermission, Wang’s playing of Chopin’s Four Ballades ranged from powerful to tenderly delicate, contrasting dramatic passages with sweet melodies, and even a few charming dance episodes. She took a narrative approach to the G-minor No.1, introducing, varying and reprising its principal melancholic theme. Along the way, Wang played glimmering runs at the top of the keyboard as she adroitly wove in a second motif and offered a brief waltz before building up to the rapturous coda.
The second and third pieces are in major keys, with the Second, in F, believed to have been intended by Chopin to correspond to the mythological story in a poem by Adam Mickiewicz. Wang expressively traced a narrative arc from a gentle opening melody through a turbulent central section, with a second subject marked by dark, dense harmonies before the return of the first theme’s lighter vein. She dashed off strong, rapid-fire figurations until, with both hands converging from opposite ends of the keyboard, she softened the volume suddenly for the final pianissimo restatement of the opening theme. The A-flat Third Ballade is brighter in mood than the others, pairing a singing opening tune with a syncopated dance melody. Wang carried off brilliantly the Ballade’s trills, sparkling runs and harmonic modulations, with great power in the concluding bars.
The F-minor Fourth is on an even larger scale. Its gently poetic opening matches a slow, steady beat with a simple melody that soon undergoes odd harmonic modulations as well as changes in dynamics, rhythm and tempo that cast it into several different guises. Wang superbly navigated these transformations, providing scintillating decorative figurations, some near the extremes of the instrument’s range, and she lovingly shaped a soft second subject. Her melodic line was spectacularly underpinned by persistent rapid left-hand runs and arpeggios, leading to a momentary pause and a slow sequence of staccato chords that erupted suddenly into the dazzling passagework of the coda and a triumphant final cadence.
Wang concluded with five encores, the first a seamless blending of Luciano Berio’s Wasserklavier into Philip Glass’s Étude No.6, which ends suddenly without a harmonic resolution. Next came her own adaptation of Samuil Feinberg’s transcription of the Scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ Symphony, and then Rachmaninov’s transcription of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Leticia Gómez-Tagle’s transcription of Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No.2 was quite charming, and in the final encore, Toccatina (Op.40/3) by Nikolai Kapustin, Wang’s fingers flew over the keyboard with as much energy as at the start of her recital!
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