Yuja Wang: Sonatas & Etudes. Chopin, Scriabin, Liszt, Ligeti.Deutsche Grammophon B0012534-02. 2009.
Back in the old days when I had plenty of column inches in the Washington Times, I occasionally reviewed classical CDs of note. But as that space dwindled and as the economy scrunched into its current nothingness, those features went by the boards. Now that I’m operating in the unconstrained world of the web, however, I’m going to get back to the CDs from time to time.
Why? I think there are interesting disks out there that you ought to know about. There are lots of exciting young artists who are reviving the classics for a younger generation, often with an exciting new twist on repertoire. There are more established artists who are staking out new ground. And there’s a new generation of composers, not often heard in the concert hall, who are once again offering music that people will want to hear. All of them deserve to be noticed, so we’ll “notice” them here for better or ill.
Due to the length of classical pieces, classical music is still a genre that thrives in the CD format in our increasingly iPod-crazed society, although I use the term “thrives” advisedly. Hit classical CDs these days sell in the hundreds not the thousands or tens of thousands. (MP3 downloads are also increasing.) That said, music fans and home listening-system aficionados like me still buy these disks, preferring their livelier sound to the somewhat compressed tracks obtainable via electronic delivery. I have a few of these CDs sitting around that I wasn’t able to review last year, plus a few more that arrived recently, so I’m going to let you know what I think about them as I find the time over the next couple of months.
One fortunate thing about reviewing classical material is that you don’t need to get on the hype train the moment the disk comes out. As opposed to pop, classical has a slower, longer shelf life. While I’m sure the issuing companies prefer reviews to show up during release week, they also know that the only way they’ll make money on classical disks is if, like classic or niche novels, these disks continue to sell year after year based on word-of-mouth advertising.
Pianist Yuja Wang. (Credit: Ms. Wang's website.)
Case in point: Yuja Wang’s debut solo CD, Sonatas & Etudes, which I received from Deutsche Grammophon early last year. Miss Wang has just released her second CD which I’ll get to eventually. But this debut album (if I can still call it that) is distinctive enough that it deserves at least a brief look.
I’ve seen Ms. Wang once or twice in concert. She’s a diminutive young woman and when you see her, part of your brain unconsciously expects a delicate, almost porcelain-like performance. Wrong answer. Sure, she can treat delicate subject matter with appropriate delicacy. But when she feels it’s called for, she can attack a Steinway concert grand with volcanic fury and blow her audience away with a tremendous passion you’re not quite expecting. We get quite a bit of this on her first CD, and that’s not necessarily a criticism.
Sonatas & Etudes is, in a vague way, a “concept album,” very vaguely like the Beatles’ "Sgt. Pepper's," in that there’s an underlying theme her with the various collected pieces serving as variations on the same.
In the case of Sonatas & Etudes, Ms. Wang opens with Chopin’s magnificently gawky "Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor," often subtitled “Funeral March” for its famous third section—I hesitate to characterize it or its associates as “movements” which is the conventional term. Robert Schumann himself, who greatly admired Chopin (though the favor was rarely returned), admired this piece but was baffled by its non sonata-like structure, observing that it was really “four of Chopin’s maddest children” joined together somewhat arbitrarily, or at least for no musically discernable reason.
In the first place, sonatas, or at least those composed during the Romantic era, are usually three-movement works. They consist of two outer movements of some complexity and occasional storminess surrounding an inner movement that’s usually more lyrical, contemplative, or dance-like than the other two.
The first two movements of Chopin’s sonata are extraordinarily turbulent and athletic, although a gentle, lyrical middle section punctuates the second. The third movement is the famous “Funeral March,” so definitively doleful and somber that it’s still used at state funerals worldwide. (A clear, although rather slow version of the march excerpted here. Boomers may remember its deployment by the Air Force Band during JFK’s 1963 funeral procession in DC which was widely televised.) Although its signature theme is well known to nearly everyone, however, its surprisingly delicate two-part center section—the true, spiritual valedictory of the movement—is less well remembered. It’s clearly Chopin’s inner farewell to the departed soul, a gentle liberation of the spirit and it’s made all the more striking by its contrast with the relentless brutality and finality of the main theme.
The sonata concludes with a fourth “movement” that could be the most enigmatic thing Chopin ever wrote. The finale, if you can call it that, is marked “Presto.” It consists of wave after wave of octave passages with repeated patterns but no discernable tune and no harmonies at all save for the concluding chords. I’ve heard it compared to ghosts flitting and skimming about in a dark and gloomy cemetery. Perhaps it’s where the ghost from the “Funeral March” went to hang out.
In any event, the movement is just baffling, particularly in the context of the 19th century. It’s minimalist before minimalism, post-modern before post-modernism. One sits and wonders: just what was going through Chopin’s head? In any event, there it is and you make of it what you will.
Ms. Wang takes a novel approach to this Sonata as well as the other large pieces on this CD. She’s energetic and heavy in the first two movements, drowning some of the lines, I think, with too much pedaling, although her interpretation of the “Funeral March” is tasteful and accurate.
But I really get the sense that it’s the enigmatic finale that captured her attention here, those elusive postmodern ghosts flittering here, there, and nowhere. She takes this very short movement faster than I’ve ever heard it, somehow maintaining the cleanness of the legato octaves and never fumbling a single note insofar as my ears can hear. And—surely as Chopin intended—she whooshes right into those abrupt final chord and disappears, leaving the auditor wondering what he’s just heard and where it all went. (Listen to an excerpt of this movement here, via Amazon.)
This movement clearly spoke to Ms. Wang and in a vague way, determined the remaining contents on this CD. Ghosts, spirits, primal or eternal questions, life, death, heaven, hell, the hereafter, the unknown? Chopin’s finale is oddly echoed in each of the pieces Ms. Wang chose to round out her album. Apparently haunted by the possibilities, these pieces seem to ask her the same question but with a different musical approach.
The additional major pieces on the CD are Alexander Scriabin’s equally weird "Piano Sonata No. 2 in G-sharp minor," and Franz Liszt’s bombastic, well-known "Piano Sonata in B-minor." The Scriabin is bookended by two brief "Etudes," Numbers 4 and 10, by contemporary composer Gyorgy Ligeti whose music many people first encountered when it was used as part of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s "2001."
The Ligeti pieces are a revelation. They’re astoundingly brisk and must be extraordinarily difficult to play, containing as they do many exhausting, repetitive patterns, particularly Number 10. They are also—bingo—very much like Chopin’s “Funeral March” finale, flickering, dancing about our heads, and disappearing out the sonic window before we can figure out what was buzzing around, maybe a little bit like Ives’ “Unanswered Question,” although at a much faster pace. They’re real virtuoso pieces, devoid of melody but not of shape, and Ms. Wang’s performances here could very well be definitive.
The Scriabin Second follows his more conventionally Romantic First Sonata composed like Chopin’s with four movements and a funeral march—in this case that sonata’s last movement. In the second, however, Scriabin was already experiencing compositional difficulties with the sonata form. He apparently left it unfinished for awhile while completing his more conventional Third, before heading off into his experimental Fourth, which ultimately led to the bizarre experimentation of his Fifth through Tenth sonatas.
When he did get around to finishing the Second, he left it only in two movements, the first vaguely containing two motifs that correspond to two movements with a rapid-fire finale left out there on its own.
The first movement of the Scriabin opens with an oddly incomplete, awkward, repeated question that’s never really resolved even though it’s treated in various ways. The second theme is a lovely motif embellished with difficult figures in the piano’s upper registers. But these quiet moments resolve back into the enigma that first launched the movement.
The second and final movement is another “Presto,” almost certainly Scriabin’s forceful homage to the “Presto” finale in Chopin’s “Funeral March” sonata, and, if anything, even more difficult to play with its sweeping octaves and wickedly complex chords.
Ms. Wang captures the odd moves of the first movement with great imagination, delicacy, and occasional power. Her approach to the finale is sweepingly turbocharged. Again, she fires off every note with great accuracy—something seemingly not possible at the rapid pace she takes. Little motifs sweep in and suddenly disappear beneath the waves of sound, an original, individualistic approach the likes of which I’ve never heard before in a live performance of this piece.
I think the Scriabin is a little more straightforward than Ms. Wang plays it—Scriabin was still in his Chopin-esque period at this point. But she rightly catches the “trilly” stuff in both movements that echoes Chopin while pointing toward the ecstatic, messianic trilling and bizarre chord structures that mark Scriabin’s later off the wall compositions.
The Liszt Sonata is probably the most straightforward sonata on this CD. That said, its long first movement, almost a piano symphony, is loaded with tempo and mood shifts. And the “Allegro energico” sections in the first and third movements again echo the obsessional scampering in the Chopin that we’ve duly noted before.
In the case of the Liszt, the composer is a little more straightforward about what haunts him than were Chopin or Scriabin. Liszt was a Faust kind of guy—as were many of the Romantics—and was clearly visiting heaven, hell, and the issues of supernatural forces and choices in this piece, something that eventually motivated him to take minor orders in the Catholic Church, more or less.
Aside from Chopin’s actual Funeral March, the grim opening bass motif in the Liszt is probably the best-known material on this CD, although most people don’t know why they recognize it. Answer: it was pilfered more than once and deployed as the spooky music in many 1930s classic horror films, usually featuring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, or both. For once, Hollywood was on target here, as Liszt himself meant this theme to underscore the hellish threats that surround us as we make our life choices.
Ms. Wang again performs this fiendish music with great power and control, although, as in the Chopin and the Scriabin, the bass notes and occasionally the pedaling emphasize elements of this piece that are not necessarily primary. Throughout this CD, in fact, I am wondering whether it’s Ms. Wang’s approach to this material or some heavy-handed engineering by the usually quite-skillful DG engineering staff. I wish I knew and could probably pick up the phone, but I suspect I wouldn’t come up with a definitive answer.
In any event, Yuja Wang’s debut album is a bold, creative statement by another of a younger generation of Chinese pianists who are, for better or worse, re-defining older works in the classical repertoire while adding contemporary pieces, many of them from Chinese composers (although not here). I question her approach in certain passages where she, or the engineers, blot out the primary melodic line in favor of the accompaniment. But given her rather metaphysical choice of repertoire here, keying off, as it were, Chopin’s weirdest moment ever, perhaps it’s worth more consideration, particularly if you’re tired of the way pianists have approached these old war-horse pieces for years.
It’s typical of the refreshing, iconoclastic attitude young Chinese musicians are bringing toward Western classical music. And we’d better get used to it.
In my own time here in the US, an insidiously left-wing view in the academy has led to the diminution of Western works of literature and art in our school systems, producing entire generations of students who no longer have a feel for our culture or desire to be involved in classical music or classical performances in any way. Isn’t it ironic that young musicians from the still-Communist land of the Little Red Book, seized by the brilliance of the European culture we seem to be trashing, are taking it, making it their own, and transforming it in highly original ways neither the academics nor die-hard Maoists could ever have imagined?
This Chinese kiddy corps is something I never imagined would materialize. But here they are, prodigiously talented, technically brilliant, and, liberated in particular by the Western Romantic repertoire, staking out new ground not only for old classics but for the new ones that they’re now probably better qualified to create than anyone else. It’s sometimes uncomfortable for a guy like me who was raised on the old, barnstorming late-Romantic pianistic heroes like Artur Rubenstein and Vladimir Horowitz. But it’s where things are going and it will be interesting to see what happens next.
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