By the middle of the first half of her recital, Yuja Wang had set an overflowing Ozawa Hall ablaze. At the end of Wednesday’s concert, one was left wondering if the venue had ever before experienced a storm of such intensity.
The program led listeners to expect a selection of Shostakovich’s op.87, a glorious opus in a somewhat academic vein, but we got a completely different offering. The selection indeed opened and ended with a Prelude and Fugue, No. 2 and No. 15 respectively, Wang sandwiched between them a selection of Op. 34 Preludes, plus one Prelude from Op.87 which she unceremoniously severed from its sister Fugue. A blast from the composer’s very different period, the Preludes brought the youthful spirit, already full to the brim with his trademark sarcasm. The sequence of Preludes — or one super-prelude if you will — built up to a return of the less sarcastic and more Bachian mood of Op. 87. But then came a surprise: the enfant terrible ghost from the more optimistic early 1930s survived into the gloomy 1950s. Prelude No. 15, hardly a timid piece in any rendition, this arrived with all the accumulated power of previous energetic morsels. Then the matching Fugue exploded in a frantic run for one’s life, as true to its fuguing etymology as ever I ever heard. In Wang’s crafty concept, whatever nastiness was breathing down the composer’s neck, he managed to escape.
A much more classicist and peaceable landscape of Barber’s Sonata in E-flat Minor completely changed the scene. A world away, albeit written within a couple of years of Shostakovich’s Fugue, it presented a very different kind of mid-century modernism. Its emphatic opening came across as eloquent, but far from overbearing. The scherzo of the second movement danced through its course lightly and charmingly. The adagio opened with more mindfulness than pathos and then built up a mighty crescendo of stronger emotions. The last movement’s fuga brimmed with plenty of energy, but sounded far from frantic, as it revisited the dissonant grumblings of the opening movement and brought the sonata to the fully gratifying climax.
Having thus communed with the ghost of Horowitz, the first performer of the Barber sonata, Wang could appropriately embark on the second half’s survey of Chopin Ballades.
Chopin’s generous fermatas and extreme slow-fast shifts in the Op. 23 established the mood of emotional rollercoaster, but also perhaps challenged pianists to construct the four pieces as components of a single edifice. The lower register roared and romantic longing embraced us.
The pastoral opening of the F major second Ballade provided enough of a contrast to think of it as a second movement. The pianist somewhat emphasized slow phrases and rushed through the fast ones, as if holding out for a later true climax.
The third Ballade started in a somewhat understated manner, as if posing for a slow movement of this quasi sonata construct. Broad crescendi dominated over a more traditional and more emotional load of smaller phrases. The lower register, somewhat heavier than customary, highlighted the richness of the counterpoint. The coda shone brilliantly, though once more with a promise of more to come, as the pianist yet again ignored the timid applause and launched into the 4th Ballade, which obligingly starts with a bit of a reminder of the rhetoric of the first one.
I had no problems with accepting that some recapitulation of lighter episodes of the two middle pieces could be heard in the last Ballade, as Wang inevitably built up the dynamics and the tension that exploded into the coda. The cathartic effect got the hall to a shouting.
The encores started with a drastic shift into a Zen mood of Berio’s Wasserklavier, followed by Phillip Glass’s Etude No. 6. The latter to me was the least rewarding part of the program, and it also got smudged by a nasty phone jingle at its tail end, with the frustrated pianist rushing off stage. She emerged seconds later, harboring no hard feelings, to start a bombastic Samuil Feinberg’s transcription of the Scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony with Wang’s own modifications or improvements. An even more brilliant transcription of Mendelssohn’s elves music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream came on its tail, this one from the pen of Rachmaninoff. At the end of it, when a conservative concert goer could be looking around and wondering if the beautiful woody hall was strong enough to withstand all this yelling and stomping of the out-of-control crowd, the pianist came back with an extra sultry rendition of Danzon No.2 by Arturo Marquez, in a Gómez-Tagle transcription.
Kapustin’s jazzy pieces hadn’t excited me before, as I usually had felt that with all formal similarities, ‘it ain’t got that swing’. But this evening’s sixth encore Toccatina had plenty, as the closer of a concert in which a mistress of exhilaration had deployed every flavor. What a night!