Yuja Wang at the NCPA: a house of flying daggers

Yuja Wang is undoubtedly talented. Her debut recording, Sonatas and Etudes, with DG, provides an early glimpse of what the 22-year-old pianist is capable of: her technique is feisty but confident, while her attacking style is relentless but controlled. When her two hands propel onwards, her piano notes fly off my loudspeaker like a swarm of flying daggers.

But her concert on June 4 at the the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) showed nothing of that promise. Her concentration was clearly absent at the beginning, when she moved a quartet of Scarlatti Sonatas with an air of banality and seeming indifference. She seemed more at ease and warmed up, albeit marginally, by the time she began Brahms' 28 Variations on a Theme by Paganini. In Book I, she managed to sustain a slow but steady build-up, with the final few variations blossoming to life. But that was when the evening took a dramatic turn. Her Book II was unsentimental, and for some unspoken reason, Wang, having seemingly lost her steady tempo, began a mad dash to the finish in a way that felt unnecessarily rushed. After the intermission, she played a lackadaisical Chopin Sonata No. 2 that was adequate on the surface but devoid of any passionate resonance -- it was almost as if Chopin's score was scanned into the music machine and reconstituted, via digital MIDI, in mechanical verbatim. The evening's final, programmed piece was Stravinsky's Petrouchka, which she played by the book but lacked the kind of playfulness often expected from Stravinsky's piece.

I certainly came to the concert hall expecting something great from Wang, but her performance tonight was anything but. Overall, she seemed to have used her sustain pedal just a tad more than she needed to, thereby rendering a night that felt more like a syrupy Monet when, given the programme's flavor, it should really have been a crisp van Eyck. More troubling was a very audible (at least to me) imbalance between a stronger left and a weaker right hand throughout the evening -- something that was clearly not an issue in her debut recording. Her last two encore pieces showed not the kind of pianist Wang could be (I believe she could be much more than displayed tonight) but should be (at least for this particular evening in Beijing): a dexterous, flamboyant artist who not only can show the [predominantly Chinese] audience a good time but can have a good time herself. Her rendition of Rondo alla Turca a la Volodos was energetic and colorful, while her Flight of the Bumble Bee was spontaneous but unflushed. It was these last two encores where the flying daggers hit their intended targets, and brought the half-sold-out audience to their feet.