For Yuja Wang’s legion of fans, the pianist’s prodigious, seemingly inexhaustible gifts are a settled matter. The sound and fury, range and finesse, drama and delicacy she summons from a Steinway grand are a renewable marvel. Her flashy costumes, too, have become a reliable feature of her performances.
Two years ago, the Chinese pianist extended her brand with a marathon feat. On a single program with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, she played all four piano concertos by Sergei Rachmaninoff, as well as the composer’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Then she did it again with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
On Thursday, Feb. 13, the tireless Wang was at Davies Symphony Hall to anchor a program with the San Francisco Symphony that featured two 20th-century piano concertos: one a standard repertory piece, the other a worthy discovery for local audiences. With any other pianist, the special technical challenges of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand would have constituted a full night’s work. But Wang, tackling the piece on the concert’s first half, was just warming up.
So there she was after intermission, striding through the arresting opening solo passage of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 1969 Piano Concerto No. 1, here in its first-ever Symphony performance. Fellow Finn and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen was on the podium.
Composed in three movements, the last two played without pause, Rautavaara’s concerto is packed with abundant invention, wit, pathos, and muscle — literally. Among the piece’s special effects are a flurry of tone clusters played with the forearm and some rivering glissandos.
The concerto wastes no time in declaring, and then developing, a compelling short motif. Wang powered through it, almost too aggressively, before handing it off to the orchestra, where the theme’s nobility emerged. Wang caught on as the motif was melodically and harmonically enriched in ringing chords and chromatic passagework, the soloist and ensemble in fruitful accord. Everyone seemed to hear each other clearly.
Soon enough, in the first of several amusing touches, the woodwinds mocked a little trumpet fanfare with their own tweeting version. A solemn hymnlike subject bloomed in the Andante, with a fizzy syncopated pop tune later on. Along the way, there were also some sardonic, atonal eruptions from the piano, delivered by Wang with fever and grit. The ending was a larky sprint.
The concerto, a serious piece that doesn’t take itself too seriously, made one want to hear more of the prolific Rautavaara (1928–2016), whose output includes multiple concertos and eight symphonies.
From the opening bars of the Ravel, in which the orchestra rumbled to life from the basses and contrabassoon to the blazing brasses, Salonen led a high-pressure performance. Wang responded in turn with some electric playing of her own.
But it was not the fortissimo passages that dazzled the most. Indeed, owing to balance issues, the orchestra swamped the soloist on several occasions. Wang did her more alluring work in the lighter passages, tenderly voicing a melody while decorating it with lacy accompaniment — a one-hand lyrical astonishment.
Wang, who changed at intermission from a regal blue gown to a taupe minidress, made a separate feast of her two encores. The first was Philip Glass’s Etude No. 6, spun out from a flurry of rapidly repeated notes. Then, with Salonen enlisted to swipe the iPad score, Wang larked her way through a transcription of Arturo Márquez’s swingy Danzón No. 2.
The French-accented evening opened and closed with Claude Debussy’s Images pour orchestre, split up as two movements to start and then “Ibéria” to end. Of the three, the “Rondes des printemps” fared best — a buoyant, breezy evocation of spring. The woodwinds, pining and burbling, stood out.
The longer Spanish-themed “Ibéria,” with its clicking castanets and chimes and surging strings, came off as so many gestural effects. The two concertos, dominant in their different ways, were the night’s defining feature.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
