Yuja Wang and San Francisco Symphony electrify

私がかねて高く評価する若手Pianist, Yuja Wang(24)が，サンフランシスコで一部の指揮者もろともの批判を別にして，もっぱら高い評価を得ていましたので，2つを取り上げてご紹介しておきます．

バルトークのピアノ協奏曲2番をマイケル・ティルソン・トーマス「MTT」指揮のサンフランシスコ響と協演した部分だけを抜粋しますと，

Yuja Wang and Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The piece opens with a brief fanfare, electrified by Wang’s playing. The layering starts almost immediately, with a violence more akin to Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring that the Symphony performed earlier this year. This piece is positively athletic in its demands on a pianist, demanding muscularity, virtuosity and stamina, and it’s hard to imagine a better performer than Wang. Her fingers were a blur, offering up powerful, scalar passages that more than stood up to the competing brass and wind sections. One senses the music literally being torn apart by the competing forces. A brief respite is offered when the second movement opens with a night music section that moves with such glacial slowness that time stands still before Wang’s intro adds to the spell cast by the music. One doesn’t normally think of the timpani as a subtle instrument, but it did everything from almost inaudible thunder to electrifying jolts. The Presto sandwiched between the two adagios was relentless as Wang kept the piece propelling forward – as she did again during the Allegro molto.

Even if you follow classical music religiously, this is one of those concerts that you’ll remember as a high water mark.

There are passages that blaze with an almost blinding light, enhanced by Bartók’s imaginative use of winds, brass, and percussion; but an entirely different approach to percussion and muted strings endows the Adagio portion with an intense, if not frightening, darkness.

The piano line, in turn, follows this same sharpness of contrast. In the light it is a dynamo of seemingly endless energy, spinning out one virtuoso passage after another, allowing little respite for the soloist. In the darkness of the Adagio, on the other hand, it withdraws into monody in octaves, almost like an incantation for some dark ritual. Wang took a full-bore approach to the energetic passages, with an almost unnerving evocation of its machine-age spirit; and that full-out approach only further enhanced the contrast with the spooky quietude of her Adagio passages. This is Bartók as he has always deserved to be heard, and serious listeners are fortunate to have three more occasions to experience this stunning interpretation.

原文のままですが，どうぞご自由にご渉猟下さい．

  

Review: Yuja Wang and San Francisco Symphony electrify

Every classical lover I know has more computer memory devoted to music than we imagined conceivable five years ago. However, none of this compares to the world class versions performed live.

by Cy Ashley Webb on 06.18.11 | View Comments

Project San Francisco: Pianist Yuja Wang

San Francisco Symphony
Davies Symphony Hall

Conductor - Michael Tilson Thomas
Piano - Yuja Wang

Review by Cy Ashley Webb

                                                                                                                                             Ever since the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra offered up such a stunning performance of Bartok’s Divertimento a few weeks ago, I’ve been wrapped in an all-Bartok-all-the-time cocoon, vacillating between New Century Chamber Orchestra’s Romanian Dances and various versions of Piano Concertos 1-3. Despite this preparation, Thursday’s open rehearsal of Bartok and Tchaikovsky’s Music from Act III of Swan Lake was full of surprises.

The first inkling that something new was afoot came during the early morning talk by Laura Stanfield Prichard during which she played snippets of a piano version of the Romanian Dances. Having listened to nothing but string versions of the same over the past weeks, I was struck by how playable these sounded. However, these were just a tease for what was to come. As conducted by MTT, the Romanian Dances open slowly, with a restraint that gets cast aside as the music begins its maddening swirl. Everything about this piece was different from what I’d been listening. How did I ever miss the pronounced pizzcato? Was it not there or was it my speakers? More to the point was the lush color that was entirely absent from my recorded versions. Who knew the clarinet played over the symphony, following on the same by flute and violin? Who imagined a violin drone below a piccolo? This brought home the importance of listening to live music. Every classical lover I know has more computer memory devoted to music than we imagined conceivable five years ago. However, none of this compares to the world class versions performed live.

Immediately following the Romanian Dances, came Yuja Wang and Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The piece opens with a brief fanfare, electrified by Wang’s playing. The layering starts almost immediately, with a violence more akin to Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring that the Symphony performed earlier this year. This piece is positively athletic in its demands on a pianist, demanding muscularity, virtuosity and stamina, and it’s hard to imagine a petter performer than Wang. Her fingers were a blur, offering up powerful, scalar passages that more than stood up to the competing brass and wind sections. One senses the music literally being torn apart by the competing forces. A brief respite is offered when the second movement opens with a night music section that moves with such glacial slowness that time stands still before Wang’s intro adds to the spell cast by the music. One doesn’t normally think of the timpani as a subtle instrument, but it did everything from almost inaudible thunder to electrifying jolts. The Presto sandwiched between the two adagios was relentless as Wang kept the piece propelling forward – as she did again during the Allegro molto.

Hearing this in rehearsal was all the more gratifying because the repeated sections provide the listener with multiple takes on the same music, deepening the experience in ways that a single run through just doesn’t. This is all the more important with Bartok, where a familiarity with the music provides a richer experience than appreciated on the first take.

The rehearsal closed with Tchaikovsky’s Music from Act III of Swan Lake. This piece includes a march, a waltz, and a half dozen other dances – which perfectly balance the dances that the rehearsal opened with.

Yuja Wang will be performing with the San Franciso Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas through Sunday. Even if you follow classical music religiously, this is one of those concerts that you’ll remember as a high water mark.

Yuja Wang’s Project San Francisco concerto performance

• June 17, 2011 8:16 am PT

Stephen Smoliar                                                                                                                    SF Classical Music Examiner

The second phase of pianist Yuja Wang’s residency under the Project San Francisco initiative with the San Francisco Symphony began last night at Davies Symphony Hall. With Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the program featured Wang soloing in the second piano concerto by Béla Bartók. This was preceded by the orchestral version of Bartók’s six-movement setting of Romanian folk dances. The intermission was followed by “something completely different,” selections from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s score for the third act of his ballet Swan Lake (Opus 20).

While the first half consisted entirely of Bartók’s music, the concerto could not have been more different from its preceding “overture.” The folk dances are based on field studies that Bartók conducted with his colleague Zoltán Kodály during the early decades of the twentieth century. They were transcribed and set for piano in 1915 and subsequently orchestrated in 1917. The latter version evoked some of the sounds of indigenous wind instruments, but both versions amount to a more polished account of rather coarse source material. They probably amount to the most affable music Bartók ever composed.

The concerto is a much later work, composed between October of 1930 and October of 1931. Bartók performed as soloist with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hans Rosbaud in January of 1933. To draw upon the title of a chamber music composition that Bartók would compose about five years later, the concerto is a work of extreme contrasts. There are passages that blaze with an almost blinding light, enhanced by Bartók’s imaginative use of winds, brass, and percussion; but an entirely different approach to percussion and muted strings endows the Adagio portion with an intense, if not frightening, darkness.

The piano line, in turn, follows this same sharpness of contrast. In the light it is a dynamo of seemingly endless energy, spinning out one virtuoso passage after another, allowing little respite for the soloist. In the darkness of the Adagio, on the other hand, it withdraws into monody in octaves, almost like an incantation for some dark ritual. Wang took a full-bore approach to the energetic passages, with an almost unnerving evocation of its machine-age spirit; and that full-out approach only further enhanced the contrast with the spooky quietude of her Adagio passages. This is Bartók as he has always deserved to be heard, and serious listeners are fortunate to have three more occasions to experience this stunning interpretation.

Swan Lake also provided many opportunities for dazzling orchestral spectacle, but it was the spectacle of another century. This is the act in which the evil magician Rothbart enchants the Prince with a vision of the Black Swan to seduce him into breaking the oath he made to the White Swan in the second act. Considering the current activities in the War Memorial Opera House, it is worth observing that the Prince’s name is Siegfried. (“I’m not making this up, you know!”) All the action takes place at the ball at which Siegfried is supposed to announce his choice for a wife; so there is an abundance of “straight dance” music, include five “nationalist” selections. Indeed, Tchaikovsky wrote so much dance music for this act that quite of few of Thomas’ selections tend to be cut from most stage productions. It was particularly nice to hear this less familiar side of Tchaikovsky, particularly in such splendid execution. This performance may have lacked the cerebral intensity of Bartók’s concerto, but it was an excellent account of just how imaginative Tchaikovsky could be with orchestral resources, even when they turned out to be the pit band for a ballet company.