Chopin winner Yang displays the art that conceals art in Carnegie debut
Pianist William Yang is the winner of this year’s National Chopin Competition, an event founded by the Chopin Foundation of the United States that’s been held every five years since 1975. Garnering that top prize means Yang is headed to the International Chopin Piano Competition this fall, as well as playing concerts produced by the Foundation before then.
Those include his Tuesday night Carnegie appearance in Weill Recital Hall, where he played Chopin, as well as Bach, Schumann, and Ravel. This was an intriguing performance by a gifted young musician.
It’s natural for the idea of a certain kind of virtuosity to come to mind when one anticipates hearing Chopin, but Yang’s playing quietly upended those expectations. His artistry was in plain sight, deceptively simple and with subtle idiosyncrasies. The combination of his touch and articulation was superb, with strength and a feeling of mass in each note yet no heaviness.
Yang’s clarity ensured that everything sounded clearly in the space—not etched but soft—and without mannerism. He is a musician who essentially disappears behind the music, and there’s an effortlessness to his playing that brings the focus away from him and toward the notes.
The surprise was a lack, in most of Yang’s playing, of rubato, always unusual in Chopin but also in Bach—he opened with the Partita No. 1. Unless one thinks being different is an issue, this was not at all a problem. Quite the opposite—it was fascinating to hear and and made one want to follow his path.
The combination of clarity, regular rhythms, and the substance of Yang’s playing set the Partita as the beautiful object it is. This was an interpretation in the sense of the artist deciding that the music had all that needed to be said within it and needed only a proper display. Emotionally sane, but not stiff nor ascetic, this was colorful Bach. Dynamics were also superb and holistic with his fine-grained technique.
This unusual balance of plainness without dryness felt ideal for Liszt’s arrangement of Schumann’s “Widmung.” Schumann’s songs are straightforward yet made florid by Liszt; Yang played it with resonance but was never torrid.
The absolute assurance of his pulse and rhythms paid off eminently in Ravel’s La Valse, which finished the first half, and Chopin’s Polonaise-fantasie in A-flat Manor, Op. 61, which began the second. His play with dynamics in La Valse was exceptional, an almost subliminal but powerful dramatic feature that came through while one was gripped by the clarity of details under his hands. The Chopin had a subdued beginning, Yang putting his thinking in front of the music the one time in the concert, but he quickly buried himself in the flow of the composer’s ideas.
The one piece where Yang did use substantial rubato was the first of the two Op. 32 Nocturnes. Though the notes were as fine as in the previous music, here the feeling was disorganized, each touch of rhythmic flexibility moving in a different direction than the others, no clear logic connecting them. He returned to his straightforward approach in the second, A-flat Major Nocturne, and everything was back on track.
He used more judicious rubato in the first movement of Chopin’s Sonata No. 3, this time with excellent results, especially as realized in the satisfying tension and release pushed by the independence between his right and left hands. The Scherzo was terrifically fleet but sounded so easy that one noticed not speed but flow. The Largo was marvelous, with beautiful phrasing and a sense of endless depths. In the Finale, the combination of energy, clear details, and speed, again, all seemed effortless, marking Yang as an impressive musician with his own style.
His encore of Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 was as clear, substantial, and satisfying as the best playing of the evening.
