05/16/2013 at 8pm
Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Coast to coast, the young Chinese pianist Yuja Wang has been astounding almost everyone who hears her. She’s a dazzling virtuoso who leaves audiences breathless and emotionally spent, sparking comparisons to Horowitz by critics from both The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post.
Yuja Wang delivers a recital of Russian, French, and American music from the late 19th and 20th centuries—works that are full of darkness and mysticism, adventure and virtuosity. Her program features two piano sonatas by Scriabin, a Russian mystic who approached both genius and madness and who, after penning an epic orchestral work in 1910 (Prometheus, Poem of Fire), wrote solely for the piano until his death five years later. That period included the shadowy Op. 62 Sonata, a single-movement work that eclipses the significant darkness of his Op. 19, which offers patches of warming light and lyricism. Another study in light and dark is Ravel’s La valse, wherein the waltz—a normally elegant dance—turns macabre in the composer’s hands, doubtless reflecting his then all too recent experience as an ambulance driver during the First World War. Opening the program is American composer Lowell Liebermann’s Gargoyles, in which darkness is offset by playfulness. Rachmaninoff, who like Scriabin was a virtuoso pianist and graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, closes the first half of Ms. Wang’s recital with his Second Sonata, Op. 36 (1931 revision), a thunderous work that—even in its triumph—cannot push out tinges of uncertainty.
http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2013/5/16/0800/PM/Yuja-Wang/?s=lgPromo3
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