Yuja Wang Disappoints on Latest Visit

Pianist Yuja Wang (photograph by Kirk Edwards, San Francisco Symphony)

Last night pianist Yuja Wang returned to Davies Symphony Hall for her latest Great Performers Series recital. She made her last Great Performers appearance about two months more than a year earlier when she was joined by the entire San Francisco Symphony conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen for a performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. She took only two encores: Franz Liszt’s adaptation of Franz Schubert’s D. 118 “Gretchen am Spinnrade” song with text taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Giovanni Sgambati’s “Melody from ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’,” his transcription of the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from the opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Last night it seemed as if she was more interested in the encores that on the works included in the program she had prepared. By my count there were seven of them, played out one-by-one with no hint of any verbal introduction. I must confess that the first four were entirely unknown to me, although it was not difficult to recognize that the third was a tango. She then moved onto the turf of three identifiable transcriptions.

The first of these was the second (Allegro molto) movement from Dmitri Shostakovich’s eighth (Opus 110) string quartet in C minor, offering some of the composer’s fieriest rhetoric. This was followed by a “return visit” to the Schubert-Liszt “Gretchen.” The encores concluded with the Allegro molto vivace march in the third movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 74 (sixth) symphony, best known as the “Pathétique.”

If I have chosen to begin with these three encores, it is because they were the most engaging portion of the evening. The least engaging was the second half of the program itself, covering all four of Frédéric Chopin’s “Ballade” compositions: Opus 23 in G minor, Opus 38 in F major, Opus 47 in A-flat major, and Opus 52 in F minor. This was probably my first encounter with Wang playing Chopin (and, for all I know, it was hers as well). She was clearly not in her comfort zone; and, if she managed to make sure that all the notes were in the right place, there was little sense that any of those notes had any rhetorical significance.

The first half of the program was an odd “reverse chronology” of three twentieth-century selections. The earliest of these was Claude Debussy’s “L’isle joyeuse,” delivered with all of its rapid-fire finger-busting accuracy and none of its erotic rhetoric. This was preceded by Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 66 (eighth) piano sonata. This was the third of the six last sonatas composed without key signatures; and, by this time (1912) Scriabin had clearly found his own “atonal voice.” Wang’s delivery was as true to the marks on paper as one could expect, making this the most satisfying account of the evening.

Less satisfying was her opening gambit, extracting two of the movements from Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (twenty contemplations on the Infant Jesus). I have taken great pleasure in this cycle for quite some time and was fortunate enough to hear a full matinee performance, which began on a sunny afternoon and concluded with the sun setting through the large glass window behind the audience area. I happen to believe that this composition works only as a cycle. Extracting a movement tears it away from the overall context. Wang selected the fifteenth and the tenth movement, playing them in that reverse order.

I have two hypotheses as to why she was doing what she did. The more positive is that she is preparing herself to take on the full cycle. Her strategy may have been to deal with some of the most challenging movements first before allowing them to take their places in the overall flow of the cycle. The more negative is that she just wanted to play the movements with the heaviest flows of notes! In either case, I feel that last night’s approach did not situate Messiaen in a particularly good light; but, since this music is performed so seldom, I doubt that many in her audience were aware of just what that light was.

To be fair, I feel that Wang deserves credit for rising to imposing challenges; but, taken as a whole, last night’s performance lacked the spirit that I had come to know so well from my previous encounters with her recitals.