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Our own Analog Scott defends Yuja's honor in epic 300+ post thread on Google Groups

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on May 31, 2016 at 16:40:24

One reason I don't post on Usenet / Google Groups is because my e-mail then gets collected and passed along to various spam generators. But another reason is because many of the opinions on Usenet are proclaimed with a level of intensity and ferocity which seem to me inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge that many of the posters actually have about the subject. This latest thread, titled "Yuja Wang sets an all-time low", details one poster's disgust with a video of Yuja's Carnegie Hall recital from a couple of weeks ago (on medici tv), wherein she played Schumann's Kreisleriana. These people are completely inarticulate when it comes to exactly what it is they don't like about the performance. You'll run across generalized pronouncements such as "she has no understanding of Schumann" while the poster naively assumes that we all share his view as to what such understanding might consist of. (Hint: it's not clear at all!) From there, the discussion usually devolves (and remember, according to Devo, devolution is a very REAL thing!) to subjects such as how short her skirt was, or how high her heels were, or how much undeserved publicity she gets. Of course, we get some of that here in discussion about various babe musicians, but I like to think that here at least, we (ahem!) keep such discussion under control. ;-)

In any case, Scott has bravely and consistently defended Yuja against such clueless observations, and it's heartening to see his patient defense in the face of so many delusional (no other word for it) comments among the Yuja detractors on that thread.

And it was thanks to Scott that I was able to experience Yuja's live performance of this same program at Sonoma State a few weeks ago. (She did a short tour in California with the same program as a kind of "warm up" for her Carnegie Hall recital.) The program consisted of two of the Brahms Op. 10 Ballades, the aforementioned Kreisleriana, and Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata. One of the qualities I prize in Yuja's playing is her leggiero touch, which enables her to clarify dense musical textures when necessary. It's as if she "lets the sunshine in" so that we, as listeners, can hear what's actually there. This quality was definitely in play in her performances of the two Brahms Ballades. The first, known as "Edward" (after the Scottish folk poem), is, in most performances, a rather dour, sullen piece, which makes use of the nether regions of the piano. The trouble is that writing in these regions, as Brahms does, kind of invites (and indeed produces) a curdling of the texture in all too many performances. But the way Yuja was able to clarify (through her extraordinary control of tone and balance) the whole piece certainly made this the most satisfying performance of this work I've ever heard. A similar command of texture was also brought to the fore in the Second Ballade too. (For some reason, she did not play the third and fourth pieces in the set.) Really, I have never heard another performance as revealing of what's actually going on in this music (I suppose you could say "structurally" - although I prefer to avoid that word) as Yuja's!



But the real revelation on the recital was Yuja's performance of the Hammerklavier. I have been longing to hear a performance of this work wherein the pianist actually takes Beethoven's metronome markings at his word, and, more importantly, has the technical chops to carry off the impossible speeds that Beethoven asks for. (Nice try, Mr. Schnabel!) Not only did Yuja get the speeds up to where Beethoven asked, but her capacity to produce expression, phrase shaping, and even color were just astounding. And the continuity and plasticity of the slow movement in Yuja's performance were simply marvelous. I'm not saying that there haven't been other interesting performances and recordings of this work, but many of them just side-step the question of tempo - for instance, Sokolov's recording is certainly interesting, but he is very slow in the fugue compared to what Beethoven asks for. (At least he does something with his slower tempo however: the detached articulation he chooses bestows on this movement a thought-provoking kinetic energy.)

I don't know why Yuja's performances don't get the respect they deserve sometimes - I'm sure some of this attitude is contrarianism, pure and simple. I hope she is afforded the opportunity to record the Hammerklavier with DG - in 24/96 sound!

The one performance on the recital I was less excited about was the performance of Kreisleriana. I couldn't follow Yuja's ideas in some parts of the work, such as when she would obscure some of the delicate, ghostly figures in the r.h. with long (too loud IMHO) sustained notes in the l.h. I just wondered what she was thinking - and, paradoxically, it's a kind of playing that is NOT typical of her usual "let the sunlight in" style.

Nevertheless, this IMHO was a magnificent recital. She played four encores, including a kind of "two for one" encore which began with the Gluck-Sgambati "Melody" and transitioned without pause into the Schubert-Liszt "Gretchen am Spinnrade" - very clever indeed! Her final encore was a kind of "double transcription" of the Mozart "Rondo all turca", basically the well known (or notorious!) Volodos transcription combined with what seemed to be parts of Fazil Say's even more outlandish (or tasteless!) transcription. Needless to say, it brought the house down. ;-)

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