Touchingly, Yuja Wang devoted her newest London look to the reminiscence of Radu Lupu, who had died three days earlier. Nevertheless it’s exhausting to think about two extra dissimilar pianists than the flamboyant, brilliantly virtuosic Chinese language and the retiring, reticent Romanian, for whom keyboard approach was solely ever a way to an expressive, poetic finish, and by no means an finish in itself.
In the intervening time, Wang’s taking part in remains to be principally about surfaces. That she has the potential to make her taking part in extra looking, although, was clear at a number of factors throughout this recital, for which there was no printed programme, only a record of the works being performed. Apparently she had not needed to commit herself upfront and to be as versatile as potential in what she supposed to play, though within the occasion what we did hear, earlier than a flurry of encores, was precisely what had been listed on the Southbank Centre’s web site for a variety of weeks earlier than the live performance.
Sonatas from reverse ends of the nineteenth century, Beethoven’s Op 31 No 3, and Scriabin’s Third Sonata, anchored the 2 halves of the programme; every was adopted by a few Twentieth-century works in a seamless sequence, with solely the briefest of breaks for applause between the gadgets. Technically every thing was dazzling, each element crisp and completely articulated, with chords precisely weighted and exactly positioned. It was all totally musical, too, by no means heartless or mechanical, however brilliance and accuracy nonetheless usually appeared to matter extra to Wang than conveying an actual sense of what the music was about.
So the baroque archetypes for the actions in Schoenberg’s Suite Op 25, his first utterly 12-note work, have been as exhausting to discern because the Spanish inflections in Malága and Lavapiés, two actions from Albeniz’s Iberia, whereas regardless of an actual sense of light grand romanticism within the Scriabin, that efficiency slightly misplaced its means within the gradual motion, although which may be as a lot the composer’s fault as Wang’s. Two of Nikolai Kapustin’s Jazz Preludes have been dispatched with all of the verve they want, however better of all was a pair of Ligeti’s etudes, Automne à Varsovie and L’escalier du Diable, the tumbling figures of the primary finally collapsing right into a black gap off the underside of the keyboard, the second’s ascending layers lastly evaporating within the highest treble. In such music, Wang’s taking part in is irresistible.
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