INTERNATIONAL STAR DAZZLES AT THE BELLA
Virtuoso Yuja Wang opens Wyatt Concert Series
Yuja Wang arrived in Calgary Wednesday night to play with much sound and fury at the newly opened Bella Concert Hall of the Mount Royal Conservatory, providing a successful inaugural solo recital at the most recently built state-of-the-art acoustic stage in our country.
Rivalling the likes of Koerner Hall in Toronto, the Bella, with its acoustics perfectly designed to register every transparent tone and crystalline sound, is indisputably a top-tier venue for concerts in this part of the world that will quickly become an attractive destination point for many international star soloists and performers.
Of course, this is good news for The Conservatory and the Wyatt Concert Series, of which this was the first of the 2015/2016 season, to say nothing of the acclaimed Morningside Music Bridge International Festival and summer programs plus a host of other musical initiatives at the university.
Co-presented with Honens and the Mount Royal Conservatory, Wang gave the Bella’s continuing Opening Festival party (this was Concert 3) the required gala glow with her powerful and entertaining playing. Most people were taken with the 28-year-old international star, and were positively dazzled by her five-encore transcription tour de force at concert’s end.
Opting to perform a lineup of the inter-related narrative styles found in both Chopin and Scriabin, the program attempted to present how the technically challenging could oftentimes interleaf with the transcendently mystical. Wang brought off the concert’s interpretive challenges with a mixed degree of success, while bringing a youthful acumen that certainly impressed the audience all night, eliciting multiple standing ovations.
Chopin and Scriabin bear strong resemblance to one another in their frequent sobriety of limpid expression and ethereality, contrasted with stridently difficult technical passagework demanding breathtaking virtuosity. Wang certainly embodied many of these virtues throughout, even grasping the essential more mystical qualities of the Scriabin Fantasie in B minor and its analogously serene moments in the third movement of Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 of the same key.
Yes, she is an at-times astonishing virtuoso, as nearly everyone hastens to mention. Yet there was often a degree of cursory treatment to nearly every narrative she played, a sameness of approach which opted for local nuance over a broader storytelling perspective.
In both sonatas of Chopin, particularly when she played Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor in the second half, there were distinct, keenly-felt absences of larger-scale structure and their implications to providing a more mature reading. The second and fourth movements in particular were less than satisfactory on this account, coming off as a blur, rather than as a lucid, fully-comprehended sound world. Virtuosity trumped clarity and Chopin’s essential message was lost in an avalanche of notes.
But this is often the hallmark of contemporary pianism in our century, which largely concerns itself less with the import of the music as a meaningful story and more as a product of direct and engaging communication consisting of two identifiable modes: serenely soft melodies or loud brazen technical passages of incomparable difficulty.
These are the extreme worlds that Wang knows well, and she draws on the contrasts between the two effortlessly, indeed with hard-won, studied mastery. Yet, amid the general mood of audience euphoria at intermission, there was still some isolated grumbling that her phrasing and tone were undifferentiated through most of the bravura passages, and that, in effect, she left no room for what can interpre- tively lie in between.
Perhaps so, but in Scriabin’s Prelude for the Left Hand Op. 9, No. 1 and his Prelude in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, No. 8 which led off the concert, she set a contemplative mood for the evening that hushed the audience and galvanized their attention toward her swift arm movement and deft contrapuntal control.
There were strong moments but they were often undercut by simple things: her left hand was continuously louder than her right, and in every piece, and there were times where phrasing evinced a sameness throughout.
Still, her interpretation of my favourite Scriabin Sonata, No. 9, the Black Mass sonata, was a memorable one. Here is where Wang thrives as an artist — in a world that seems to open up to her, encouraging her to strive for deeper and subtler, nuanced expression.