I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of Ms. Wang before yesterday. Stumbled upon her yesterday. Was reading an article in the ex-Quasi's and saw a blurb: "Yuja Wang Plays Dazed Chaos, Then Seven Encores." Obviously Chinese and what intrigued me enough to click on the blurb and read my first article EVER on Ms. Wang was the obvious, to me, Chinese-ness in the lede for "dazed" is what Chinese often have been and "chaos" often has been what has dazed them. The phrase "Dazed Chaos" as applied to China conjures in me, obviously, the Cultural Revolution. "Chaos" (混沌)is the dirtiest word in the Chinese language today but back then it was a good, sort of. "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent" (在天堂下的一切都完全混乱;情况非常好) . Good in a Maoie kind of way. I instantly could picture in my head what it would mean to interpret a score and to play the piano as Red Guards played politics and I felt a frisson. I thrilled to read and my heart pace quickened. This is from the Times:
Through her concert’s uncompromisingly grim first half and its wary, stunned second, Ms. Wang charted wholly dark, private emotions.
After the playbills had been printed, Ms. Wang...revised her program. That's 混沌.
Ms. Wang played none of these pieces in a way that made them seem grounded or orderly; (Of course not!) she even seemed to want to run the seven together in an unbroken, heady minor-key span...these pieces blurred into and stretched toward one another. Ms. Wang emphasized unsettled harmonies and de-emphasized melodic integrity. [In] the Étude-Tableau...she was telling two surreal tales at once. The martial opening of the Prelude in G Minor...swiftly unraveled into something woozy and bewildering. The washes of sound in the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 39, No. 1) were set alongside insectlike fingerwork — neurotic, insistent, claustrophobic.
Her bending of the line in the Étude-Tableau in B Minor (Op. 39, No. 4) felt like the turning of a widening gyre, infusing the evocation of aristocratic nostalgia with anxiety. (Rachmaninoff composed most of the works Ms. Wang played as World War I loomed and unfolded...The stretched-out, washed-out quality of melancholy in her account of the Étude-Tableau in C Minor...made that sorrow seem more like resignation: The loneliness she depicted felt familiar to her, even comfortable.
The prevailing mood — dreamlike sadness; a feeling of being lost; rushing through darkness...The relentless trills...glittered angrily.
There was the sense that more time than just 20 minutes — decades, perhaps — had elapsed during intermission, after which Ms. Wang played Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 8, composed during World War II. Here...Ms. Wang seemed to inhabit a kind of aftermath of the dazed chaos she had depicted in the early-20th-century works on the first half...The effect was still unnerving.
...her ominous vision of this music.
a demented arrangement of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”...
And with this from Classical Scene, the undersigned rests his case:
Does she radiate pure joy?... Not her style.
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Time condensed.
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[Chopin B Minor Sonata, Op. 58]: She danced over the keyboard for the 2nd movement scherzo and barely slowed down for the middle section, then sped up for the reprise! Which was a bit otherworldly...
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Her abilities so far exceed mere mortal ones that it just doesn’t occur to ponder what it might be like to play like that.
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[Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrouchka]: She had us thinking of inner voices (musically) [No! Not only musically] while hearing music that was at once brittle, harsh (both good things), bright, and dark. [Those are the contradictions with which Mao Zedong challenged the Chinese people.] And at times, were there sounds of innocence. Really? Yes, for lack of a better word. And pain.
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Shimmery playing... And bell sounds... Wang took us for a great ride in the 3rd movement, covering so much ground (and keyboard), galloping then thudding (another good thing) to conclusion.
