For Women's History Month, we celebrate our rising star piano virtuoso, Yuja Wang. Acclaimed worldwide as one of the greatest pianists and interpreters of all time, she is at the pinnacle of the new generation. Born in China, her gifts bloomed early under a series of great teachers, both sides of the Pacific. She emigrated here as a teenager and has stunned the Classical music world globally.
At age 11 she entered Calgary's Mount Royal University in Alberta as its youngest student. At 15 she then studied with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. What most impressed Graffman was not her precocious technique, already winning international competitions, but her profound musicality.
After graduating she played with the finest orchestras and conductors on both sides of the pond, taking the music world by storm. Recently at Carnegie Hall in 2023 she played all 4 Rachmaninoff Concerti followed by his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, five hours of continuous musical movements with only short breaks. She performed without tablet or score, all memorized. That is unbelievable. Literally hundreds of pages of some of the most difficult music ever written, all inside your head. One must become the composer. It bespeaks the madness of genius. Critics have compared it to climbing a Musical Mount Everest; no-one has done this before.
Before that she spent some time here in San Francisco studying with the great Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT, our finest conductor since Bernstein) before he retired, learning the subtleties of orchestration, and how to use the piano itself as a tone-color orchestra, like the legendary Liszt did. And performing mind-blowing concertos, both here and in New York. Her subsequent Rachmaninoff marathon in NY was phenomenal!
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For Classical music fans, it used to be that few could 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), 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, the 48 remarkable Preludes and Fugues for Well-Tempered Clavier, are perhaps the best since Glenn Gould, a historic Bach interpreter. (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. Gould also composed well but died young.)
But our new rising star is the literal replacement for Argerich, if such were possible, and none more fitting: The Promethean Yuja Wang, whose musical chops and sheer physicality rival the guys. She took over for the great Swiss pianist when Argerich had to cancel a series with the NY Philharmonic. And she has a depth, passion and power of interpretation like none since Argerich and Richter.
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Beethoven, Grand Sonata für das Hammerklavier
Her Beethoven is unbelievable. When she first 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 Grave doloroso, and the Finale a chromatic and gnarly fugue whose lines have been compared to pythons twisting around each other. But it also has beautiful and delicate moments that have to be exquisitely executed, like quiet trills over runs which are chillingly lovely, and multiple 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 intimidating!
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 (his series of poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, is set in France's Southern plateau region, culturally the ancient Roman province of Narbonensis and rife with legends of ghosts, goblins and spirits):
He looked under the bed,
in the chimney, in the
sideboard;--nothing. He
could not comprehend how
he had let himself in, or
how he had escaped.
- Hoffman, Night Tales
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 myself and the moon like the steeple of a gothic cathedral, a golden bell swinging 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!
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*Bees were the symbol of the Merovingian Dynasty of the Ancient Franks, before Charlemagne. One of its heraldic signs was a shield argent, another a banner azure proper with abeilles d’or. Bees were later adopted as a Bonaparte family sigil.
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This is the human spirit at the limits of expression and unselfconscious immersion in the flow of a great poem.
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