Yuja Wang had promised Schubert, Brahms and Chopin for her Royal Festival Hall recital in London. But by the time she walked on to the platform, the Schubert – two of the Three Piano Pieces, D946 – had been dropped, and the order of the other two works had been reversed, leaving barely an hour of music from her advertised programme.
So Wang launched straight into Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op 28, in a performance that only occasionally flared into life – predictably enough in the numbers that are most technically demanding – but which too often resorted to tapering off the ends of phrases with diminuendos and ritardandos to conjure expressive effects. Her Chopin playing never for a moment seemed either personal or instinctive, just calculated and contrived.
After the interval, Brahms’s Handel Variations, Op 24 evidently demanded a different frock from the earlier Chopin, although Wang’s approach to the music hadn’t changed so strikingly. Of course, the variations were played immaculately, but they never took on individual characters, and remained a shapeless sequence, capped by a strenuous rather than climactic fugue.
Perhaps to compensate for the loss of the Schubert at the start of the evening, there was a generous selection of four encores. The first was Scriabin’s single-movement Fourth Sonata, which suddenly brought Wang’s playing to life, flashing and darting with exactly the right kind of nervous energy. This was Wang at her best, in music that requires technical brilliance and a bit of irresistible devilry rather than expressive point-making.
- At Royal Festival Hall, London, on 11 May. Box office: 020-7960 4200.
