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IAN 1/16, Great Women of Music - Yuja Wang, Promethean Pianist [1]
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Date: 2025-01-15
Today for Music as Healing, and boy do we need it, we’ll take a look at America’s rising star piano virtuoso, Yuja Wang. She spent some time here in SF studying with the great Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT, our greatest conductor since Bernstein) before he retired, learning the subtleties of orchestration, and how to use the piano as a tone-color orchestra like Liszt did. And performing mind-blowing concertos, both here and NY. Her Rachmaninoff marathon in NY was phenomenal!
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For Classical music fans, most of us know the great male pianists: Sviatoslav Richter, the dominating Russian whose enormous hands and superhuman technique shook the Richter Scale (ha), the great Horowitz, the iconic Canadian Glenn Gould (a fine composer too, but he died young), Ashkenazy, Rubinstein, Michelangeli and a raft of others. But few can name great lady pianists off the top of their heads; Wanda Landowska, Martha Argerich and Clara Schumann are who most people know (Clara was a fine and underrated composer as well), but this is reaching back a ways. A really fine contemporary pianist known to connoisseurs is Evelyne Crochet, whose Bach WTC I and Bach WTC II are perhaps the best since Glenn Gould. (And very different, where Gould is dry and incisive hers are warm and lyrical, but with equally clear attention to the contrapuntal lines and their shaping.)
Our subject today is the replacement for Argerich, if such were possible: The incomparable Yuja Wang, whose musical chops and sheer physicality rival the guys. With a depth and power of interpretation like none since Argerich and Richter.
Her Beethoven is unbelievable. When she did this at Carnegie Hall, they said “this was a masterwork at 26. What will she be doing at 40?” (Great musicians get better with age). LVB’s Hammerklavier Sonata No. 29, Op. 106 was written in total deafness and is 100 yrs. ahead of its time. No-one at the time understood it, let alone could play it. The first movement is like a Chopin Sonata, the 2nd a difficult and humorous Scherzo, the 3rd a long impassioned Adagio doloroso, and the Finale a chromatic and gnarly fugue whose lines have been compared to pythons twisting around each other. But it has beautiful and delicate moments that have to be exquisitely executed, like quiet trills over runs which are chillingly lovely, and 3 simultaneous trills, along with a contrasting second theme and double fugue. The technique required is monstrously difficult. She does it flawlessly; follow the score, not a note or phrase off, all the parts clear as a bell! (Finale starts very quietly at about 28:00)
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Here’s Liszt’s famous Sonata in B Minor, a chef-d’oeuvre of Romantic Era virtuosity. And Wang delivers it with a power and grace of command that rivals Argerich or Richter. Just incredible how that petite frame has such strong forearms; she is our Lady Galadriel of the arts, her technique is beautiful and terrifying!
Schumann asked his friend Liszt to prioritize dense musical content in this continuous-movement Sonata-Fantasy. It is a phenomenal workout of technique, contrapuntal themes and extraordinarily muscular beauty, interspersed with magically lyrical Romantic skeins of melody like fine lace. When the harmony breaks out in massive, sumptuous chords, it's like a giant clipper ship with all sails billowing in the sun.
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Her Rachmaninoff has become legendary; here she is doing the Etudes-Tableaux, among the most difficult Romantic Era Piano Literature ever written:
No. 1 in C Minor. She plays it so elegantly, so exquisitely, it masks the difficulty, like Argerich playing Ondine from Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit.
No. 5 in E Flat Minor is lyrically beautiful, and deceptively hard. Appassionato, but she does it with such fine shaping of the phrases, it sounds like a Chopin Prelude.
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And here she is with Ravel’s Scarbo, again one of the most difficult and demonic piano pieces ever written! (Sometimes on 3 staves to clarify the fiendishly thorny thickets of parts.) She plays it perfectly, with exquisite grace and amazing power and control. It was inspired by a fantastic poem by Aloysius Bertrand, describing a malevolent goblin who haunts a Medieval Chateau in the Midi:
Ah! How often have I heard and seen him, Scarbo, when at midnight the moon glitters in the sky like a silver shield on an azure banner strewn with golden bees!*
How often have I heard his laughter buzz in the shadow of my alcove, and his fingernail grate on the silk of the curtains of my bed!
How often have I seen him alight on the floor, pirouette on one foot and roll through the room like the spindle fallen from the wand of a sorceress!
Did I think him vanished then? The dwarf appeared to stretch between the moon and myself like the steeple of a gothic cathedral, a golden bell shaking on his pointed cap!
But soon his body developed a bluish tint, translucent like the wax of a candle, his face blanched like a melting taper — and suddenly he was extinguished!
*Bees were the symbol of the Merovingian Dynasty of the Ancient Franks, before Charlemagne. One of its heraldic emblems was a shield argent, on a banner azure proper with abeilles d’or. Bees were later adopted as a Bonaparte family sigil.
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