Yuja Wang Highlights Two American Composers

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of the Verve Label Group)

This coming Friday, Deutsche Grammophon will release its latest album of performances by pianist Yuja Wang. The title of the album is The American Project. Eleven of the tracks are devoted to the world premiere recording of a piano concerto that Teddy Abrams composed for her. They are preceded by “You Come Here Often?,” which Michael Tilson Thomas created for Wang and serves as an overture of sorts. The entire album is a little more than 40 minutes in duration, with the overture lasting four minutes and 34 seconds (probably not as an homage to John Cage). As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders.

I should begin by “coming clean” with a disclaimer. Most readers probably already know that, this past Wednesday evening, I Iistened to Wang play Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. For better or for worse, that stunningly jaw-dropping account is still ringing in my ears. This is music that overshadows so much repertoire from the past that it will probably take the present some time to rise to the same level, whether it involves the architecture of the concerto itself or the flood of technical challenges, which provide the “nuts and bolts” of that architecture. Furthermore, my recent experience is far from a flash in the pan, since Wang has been promoting Rachmaninoff’s music for piano and orchestra since the beginning of this year, the year which will see the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth this coming April 1.

The fact is that, as T. S. Eliot would have put it, neither Abrams nor Tilson Thomas is Rachmaninoff, nor was meant to be. On the other hand Abrams himself claims that his concerto emerged from a desire to provide a “companion composition” for George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Sadly, his intimations of Gershwin do not hold up any better, even without the shadow of Rachmaninoff (who apparently thought very highly of Gershwin). To be fair, Abrams’ concerto provided Wang with four killer cadenzas, each of which offers up challenges that reflect on at least some of Rachmaninoff’s inventive demands. However, the concerto has a one-thing-after-another rhetoric, which amounts to wandering through a forest of “American idioms.” At least Tilson Thomas appreciated the power of brevity.