Emerging young pianist Wei Luo (from the Amazon.com Web page for her debut album)
At the end of last month, Decca Gold released the debut album of the young Chinese pianist Wei Luo. Luo is currently studying with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music, and last year she was granted the 2018 Gilmore Young Artist Award. Prior awards include first prizes in both the eleventh Chopin International Competition for Young Pianists and the second Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition for Young Pianists. Here in San Francisco she made her debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) at the annual Gift Concert recital held on April 2, 2017.
As might be expected, her debut album showcases many facets of the diversity of her repertoire. She bursts out of the gate, so to speak, with Maurice Ravel’s solo piano transcription of his “choreographic poem” composed for full orchestra, “La Valse.” The Wikipedia page for this composition cites the transcription as “infrequently performed due to its difficulty;” but my own library includes a performance of that transcription played by HJ Lim.
The majority of the album, however, is devoted to Russian composers. In “order of appearance” they are Dmitri Shostakovich (two of the prelude-fugue couplings from his Opus 87 set of 24, those in D major and D minor), Sergei Prokofiev (his Opus 83 sonata in B-flat major, the second of his three “war” sonatas), and Rodion Shchedrin (the first two of the 25 preludes in his Polyphonic Notebook). However, Joseph Haydn “intervenes” between Shostakovich and Prokofiev with a performance of his Hoboken XVI/52 sonata in E-flat major.
Wei’s performance of “La valse” definitely grasps the attention of the serious listener. She clearly has the discipline to take on Ravel’s challenges and is not afraid to reveal the connotations of this music as the disquieting reflections of a mind seriously impacted by the horrors of World War I. In a similar vein, while Shostakovich composed his preludes and fugues in 1950 and 1951, the D minor fugue suggests that World War II continued to haunt him. This is the most monumental of the fugues in the overall collection; and Wei clearly appreciates that the rhetorical side of this music is as important as a command of the composer’s polyphony, if not more so.
On the other hand the weight of her intensity does not serve her particularly well in her approach to Haydn. It is not that she does not appreciate the need for a light touch when approaching Haydn. However, her pendulum swings between thematic material that clearly needs that touch to overdoing the sections that call for louder dynamics. Clearly, Haydn did not write this sonata for a modern grand piano; but there are any number of pianists who know how to keep from going overboard when Haydn calls for fortissimo. On this particular recording Wei has not yet established herself as one of them.
Ironically, that pendulum swings to the other extreme in her approach to Prokofiev. The tempo specification of the first movement may be Allegro inquieto, but Wei’s reading almost feels as if she wants it to be jolly. Similarly, the lifting of tensions in the second movement comes across as more syrupy than other Prokofiev pianists deliver. Only in the third movement does Wei arrive at a rhetorical stance consistent with the context of this “war” sonata; and it is a bit too late for most listeners by then. Still, her capacity for lighter spirits servers her well with the Shchedrin pieces that close out the album.
Sadly, I have not been able to find an account of Wei’s SFP recital. I know that her program included both the same two Shostakovich prelude-fugue couplings and the same Prokofiev sonata. Unfortunately, however, my schedule did not allow me to attend that particular event. The actual recording sessions for her debut album took place over a year after that recital, so I am not even sure that her frame of mind at that time would have been consistent with they way in which she approached those two composers when playing in Herbst Theatre. As a result, the best I can say about her debut album is that it has piqued my curiosity; but my curiosity about her second album may be more guarded.
No comments:
Post a Comment