Last night in Herbst Theatre, pianist Joyce Yang made her solo San Francisco Performances (SFP) recital debut as the second artist in the 2021–2022 Piano Series. This was not her first SFP appearance, having performed twice in Herbst with SFP Ensemble-in-Residence, the Alexander String Quartet, first in November of 2015 and a second time in February of 2019. On that second occasion she performed the West Coast Premiere of “Quintet with Pillars,” composed by Samuel Adams and scored for string quartet and piano with digital resonance.
The program she prepared for her solo debut focused primary on virtuoso compositions grounded in nineteenth-century rhetoric. Nevertheless, she began her recital in a “completely different” domain with a solo piano account of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 816 (“French”) suite in G major. This got her program off to an excellent start, even if not a “historically informed” one. For the most part she knew how to shape the rhetorical spirit of each of the seven movements to accommodate the affordances of her instrument; and in (at least) one of the movements, she embellished her reading of the marks on paper with a few modestly engaging improvisations. Over the course of the suite she managed to capture the “dance spirit” of each of the movements, the only exception being an awkward reading of the Courante movement that would have confused any dancer of Bach’s period.
Sadly, her perceptive account of Bach gave way to performances dominated by virtuosic bombast. The program concluded with the major offering, Franz Liszt’s B minor sonata. This was an ambitious undertaking to unfold a solo piano sonata as an extended sequence of episodes that proceed without any pauses. Flamboyant technique is the one attribute that cuts across all of those episodes, and it is a product of Liszt’s efforts at a time when his motto may well have been “Nothing succeeds like excess.”
Yang was not shy when it came to unleashing her own flamboyant rhetoric. However, in approaching the sonata as a whole, she could not give a particularly convincing account, resorting, instead, to what amounted to a narrative of “one damned thing after another.” In all fairness, I should say that I have had more than my fair share of encounters with this score through both recitals and recordings. When I try summon up memories of those encounters, I fear that only one of them left me with a sense of satisfaction.
In a similar vein the first half of the program labored under the ten preludes that Sergei Rachmaninoff collected for his Opus 23. Yang offered some introductory remarks about Rachmaninoff composing a set of preludes in all 24 major and minor keys. She failed to mention that the entire collection was spread across three opus numbers, preceded by Opus 3 and followed by Opus 32. Whether or not Opus 23 can be taken as a journey unto itself is left as an exercise for the listener. Sadly, Yang brought a heavy-handed approach to most of the preludes in this collection, thus foreshadowing the Liszt performance that would follow the intermission. This left the listener with few “guideposts” for any sense of a journey through her interpretations of the ten preludes.
The only relief from the bombast of both Rachmaninoff and Liszt came after the intermission. Yang played the “June” movement from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 37a suite The Seasons. (This consists of twelve movements, one for each month, rather than four movements for the seasons themselves.) The “June” movement is a barcarolle in the key of G minor. It has a wistfully poignant rhetoric that seems to challenge the cheerful dispositions that one tends to associate with spring. Yang clearly appreciated Tchaikovsky’s rhetorical stance, giving an account convincing enough to leave me wondering what she could do with the other eleven movements of the suite.
Rhetorical poignancy also emerged when Yang played her encore in the wake of her Liszt journey. Her selection was the “Notturno” from Edvard Grieg’s Opus 54 collection under the title Lyric Pieces. Yang clearly has a command of expressiveness in her knapsack of skills. Unfortunately, the program she prepared for last night seemed biased in favor of fireworks, resulting in an overall experience that was disconcertingly unsatisfying.
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