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In Reply to: RE: Relax, it's all good posted by rbolaw on July 24, 2014 at 19:52:10
Also, bluemooze is right - the guy needs to define his terms.
Follow Ups:
But in fairness to the random writer I excerpted here, he was just writing a brief concert review, not a learned book-length treatise on piano music of the romantic era. One can go to Charles Rosen for that.
When I wrote my first post, I had never read a single Yuja Wang review. But having heard her, I knew I could find a few comments like his amongst the predictable torrent of praise.
Hey, if there was only one right way to play Chopin, that wouldn't be saying much for Chopin, right? CASG.
One shouldn't have much trouble finding reviewes that agree with their own biases. Here are e few reviews you did not mention.
"There are recitals, there are great recitals, and then there’s Yuja Wang. In an extraordinary scene Sunday in Herbst Theatre, after hearing her play the audience appeared both exhausted and elated. My hands hurt not merely from applauding, but also from an apparent case of couvade syndrome (men’s sympathy pain at childbirth) on listening to two hours of devilishly difficult Scriabin and Prokofiev played with ease and clarity.
It was a relief to hear emphatic agreement from a fellow admirer of Martha Argerich (who gave Yuja a huge
[Armed for anything]
Armed for anything
boost at the beginning of the Chinese teenager's career) that Yuja's full tone in her right-hand melodic material is now really close to that of the Maestra herself.
Argerich and even Horowitz come to mind witnessing Yuja lighting-fast and yet effortless passage work. Her smooth, almost imperceptible change of dynamics within a measure, and the freedom of the left hand in treating melodies are stupefying
Said the fellow Argerich (and now Yuja) fan: "I normally stay away from piano concerts because the majority play everything as if every note should have the same level of intensity. I don't know why that's trained into so many pianists. Yuja is very different: her shaded dynamic readings are wonderful."
So, what did she do after the ovation following her program? She sat down and gave a couple of encores: Chopin (Waltz in C-sharp Minor) and Scarlatti (Sonata in G Major, K. 455), both played exquisitely. It was truly a concert to treasure."
"The arrival of Chinese-born pianist Yuja Wang on the musical scene is an exhilarating and unnerving development. To listen to her in action is to re-examine whatever assumptions you may have had about how well the piano can actually be played.
There are virtuosos who can get around the keyboard with comparable speed and accuracy, but they don’t achieve the kind of rhythmic ease and communicative grace that Wang does. There are pianists who can probe as deeply, or even more so, into the structural mysteries of the great piano masterpieces, but their fingers don’t relay those findings as reliably as Wang’s can."
And we have things like Gary Graffman calling her an artist that comes around once in a hundred years. And we can look to Michael Tilson Thomas, Charles Dutoit, Zubin Mehta, Gustavo Dudamel, Claudio Abbado and most recently Esa Pekka Salonen as huge fans of Yuja Wang.
But apparently none of those folks seem to know all that much about the "presence of finesse and architecture"....I guess.
Look, preferences in classical music are quite personal and there is nothing wrong with liking what you like and not liking what you don't like. But let's keep it real. She knows what she's doing. She doesn't lack any fundamental understanding of musical structure.
You can always find a wide range of opinions. That's what's great about music, and art in general. And nobody has the right to tell you yours is wrong.
Or mine. ;-)
I found music reviews even more diverse.
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