Pianist Yang dazzles with virtuosity, intelligence and color
The Mannes International Piano Festival, a summer offering of the Mannes School of Music at The New School, brings together seminars, coaching, a competition, and a concert series presenting rising stars of the keyboard.
This last element got underway Monday with a consistently musical and often dazzling recital by Jiwon Yang, performing some of the showiest pieces Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy, Lowell Liebermann and Ravel ever wrote.
The carnival of virtuosity calls for not just speed and accuracy but feathery leggiero touch when needed, voicing for a three-dimensional sound, rich, round fortissimos and a host of other virtues, all wrapped in an air of confidence and ease. Yang had all of these, though her fortissimos sometimes sounded brittle. In any case, “playing” the piano shouldn’t look like work.
Yang’s performance of Beethoven’s Variations and Fugue in E-flat major, Op. 35 (“Eroica”) looked like woek—even with her intelligence, attentiveness to the character of each variation, and technical prowess. As she dispatched one variation after another, one was more aware of a pianist realizing a score than of that irresistible multiple personality behind the notes—scamp, lover, practical joker, showoff, madly swinging between irascibility and tenderness.
Paradoxically, in a performance of one of the great variations sets, conveying the overall emotional arc of the work is what enlivens the individual character of each variation. Performances where the pianist is perpetually “starting over” are what bring on the frequent complaint that variations are tedious.
Yang was anything but tedious on Monday, thanks to her smart playing in each moment. But one wished she would just jump in the car and let Beethoven take her for a wild ride.
An opera paraphrase by Liszt is a wild ride of another sort. In a piece like his Réminiscenses de Norma, there’s always a risk that the reminiscence itself—Bellini’s opera, with its suspense, confrontations and bel canto melodies—will be forgotten in the razzle-dazzle of gymnastic feats at the keyboard.
Yang’s performance didn’t entirely avoid that risk, as tunes struggled to be heard amid the immaculately executed avalanche of octaves, keyboard-spanning arpeggios and “three hands” effects. When the storm abated at mid-piece, the music tended to wander while it waited for Liszt’s flourishes to return. But as a jaw-dropping example of pianism gone wild, Yang’s performance would be hard to top.
Following intermission, one braced oneself for more keyboard pyrotechnics in Debussy’s most intentionally virtuosic piece, L’isle Joyeuse. But Yang had something else in mind, as the composer’s “joyous”—read “erotic”—island came wrapped in a quiet fog of sensuality illuminated by little lightning flashes. The composer’s trademark whole-tone harmonies never sounded more unmoored, nor a love theme more dream-like. Yet by the end, Wang had swelled these wisps of ideas into a splendid climax. This was virtuosity not for its own sake, but generated from compelling emotion.
Having revealed previously unsuspected resources of tone color in the Debussy, Yang went on to give sharply characterized renderings of the four brief vignettes in Lowell Liebermann’s Gargoyles. Two toccata movements—one a blur of alternating hands with stark loud-soft contrasts, the other a more Prokofiev-like thumper—bookended a not-so-simple Adagio semplice and a rippling Allegro high on the keyboard, its melody outlined in silver droplets.
To close the program, Yang followed Liebermann’s delightfully pianistic miniatures with the seemingly impossible task of reducing Ravel’s kaleidoscopic orchestral vision in La valse to two hands on a keyboard. The composer, in his own arrangement of the piece, made severe technical demands on the pianist and, for good measure, wrote additional lines in small notes to indicate the orchestral parts—whistling chromatic scales, oceanic surges in the bass—that he had to leave out.
Pianists, of course, couldn’t resist the challenge of working them back in, while sometimes adding long glissandos to approximate the effect of Ravel’s full-orchestra crescendos. No arranger was listed on Monday’s program, because what Yang played was a combination of Ravel’s arrangement and an oral (or rather digital) tradition that has sprung up around the piece, apparently including some new glissandos and dazzling fingerwork of her own.
Amid all this activity the lilting rhythm of the waltz tended to get lost, along with Ravel’s subtler orchestral shadings. But there was no end of intriguing details in this rendering—a well-timed rubato here, a soft buttery glissando there—and long before the piece’s apocalyptic climax, there were subtle suggestions that the music was coming unglued. It was a well-conceived performance overall, with a white-hot finish that topped all the others in this virtuoso program.
There were no encores, but rather presentation of flowers to the pianist and words of congratulation from the evening’s host, Mannes piano department chair Pavlina Dokovska, who invited the audience to return this week for more recitals in this series.
The Mannes International Piano Festival Concert Series runs through July 22. The next concert is pianist Nicolas Salloum performing works of Bach, Schumann, Chopin and Prokofiev, 7 p.m. Wednesday in Tishman Auditorium, 73 Fifth Avenue. Admission free with reservation. events.newschool.edu
