Études-tableaux Op.39 - Allegro agitato in C minor, No.1
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (Russian: Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов), 1 … Read Full Bio ↴Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (Russian: Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов), 1 April 1873 - 28 March 1943, was a composer, pianist, and conductor. Alternative transliterations of his name include Sergey, Sergej or Serge, and Rachmaninov, Rakhmaninoff.) Rachmaninoff was born in 1873 in Semyonovo, near Novgorod, in north-western Russia. He was born into a noble russian family, who had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century. His parents were both amateur pianists.
Rachmaninov is regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. He had legendary technical facilities and rhythmic drive, and his large hands were able to cover the interval of a thirteenth on the keyboard (a hand span of approximately twelve inches). His large handspan roughly corresponded with his height; Rachmaninov was 6 feet 6 inches (1.98m) tall according to sources[citation needed]. He also had the ability to play complex compositions upon first hearing. Many recordings were made by the Victor Talking Machine Company recording label of Rachmaninov's performing his own music, as well as works from the standard repertory.
His reputation as a composer, on the other hand, has generated controversy since his death. The 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians notoriously dismissed his music as "monotonous in texture ... consist[ing] mainly of artificial and gushing tunes ..." and predicted that his popular success was "not likely to last". [1] To this, Harold C. Schoenberg, in his Lives of the Great Composers, responded, "It is one of the most outrageously snobbish and even stupid statements ever to be found in a work that is supposed to be an objective reference." Indeed, not only have Rachmaninov's works become part of the standard repertory, but their popularity among both musicians and audiences had, if anything, increased during the second half of the twentieth century, with some of his symphonies and other orchestral works, songs and choral music recognized as masterpieces alongside the more familiar piano works.
His compositions include, among others, four piano concerti, three symphonies, two piano sonatas, three operas, a choral symphony (The Bells, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe), the All-Night Vigil for unaccompanied choir (often known as Rachmaninov's Vespers), the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, 24 Preludes (including the famous Prelude in C-sharp minor), 17 Études-tableaux, Symphonic Dances and many songs, of which the most famous is the wordless Vocalise. Most of his pieces are in a melancholy, late Romantic style akin to Tchaikovsky, although strong influences of Chopin and Liszt are apparent. Further inspiration included the music of Balakirev (Милий Алексеевич Балакирев), Mussorgsky (Модест Петрович Мусоргский), Medtner (Николай Карлович Метнер)(whom he considered the greatest contemporary composer and who, according to Schoenberg's Lives, returned the compliment by imitating him) and Henselt.
Rachmaninov was born in Semyonovo, near Novgorod in north-western Russia, into a noble family of Tatar descent, who had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century. His parents were both amateur pianists, and he had his first piano lessons with his mother on their family estate at Oneg; however, his parents noticed no outstanding talent in the youngster. Because of financial difficulties, the family moved to Saint Petersburg, where Rachmaninov studied at the Conservatory before moving to Moscow. There, he studied piano under Nikolay Zverev and Alexander Siloti (who was his cousin and a former student of Franz Liszt). He also studied harmony under Anton Arensky, and counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev. It should be noted that, in his younger days, Rachmaninov was found to be quite lazy, failing most of his classes and spending much time skating. It was the strict regime of the Zverev home (a place for many young musicians, including Scriabin) that instilled discipline in the boy.
Already, in his early years, he showed great skill in composition. While still a student, he wrote the one-act opera, Aleko (for which he was awarded a gold medal in composition), his first piano concerto and a set of piano pieces, Morceaux de Fantaisie (Op. 3, 1892), including the popular and famous Prelude in C-sharp minor. (According to Francis Crociata’s liner notes to RCA's 10-CD set of Rachmaninov’s recordings, the composer later became annoyed by the public’s fascination with this piece, composed when he was just 19. He would often tease an expectant audience by asking, “Oh, must I?” or claiming inability to remember anything else.) Rachmaninov confided in Zverev his desire to compose more, requesting a private room where he could compose in silence, but Zverev saw him only as a pianist and severed his links with the boy. After the success of Aleko, however, Zverev welcomed him back as a composer and pianist. His first serious pieces for the piano were composed and performed as a student, at the age of thirteen, during his residence with Zverev. In 1892, at nineteen, he completed his Piano Concerto No. 1 (Op. 1, 1891), which he revised in 1917.
Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 1 (Op. 13, 1896) premiered on 27 March 1897 in one of a long-running series of "Russian Symphony Concerts", but was torn apart by critics. In a particularly vitriolic review by César Cui, it was likened to a depiction of the seven plagues of Egypt and suggested that it would be admired by the "inmates" of a music conservatory in hell. It is often mooted that the criticisms stem from inadequacy of the performance. The conducting of Alexander Glazunov is often remembered as a problem: he liked the piece, but was a weak conductor and starved of rehearsal time. Rachmaninov's wife later suggested that Glazunov may have been drunk and, although this was never intimated by Rachmaninov, it would not seem out of character. The disastrous reception, coupled with his distress over the Eastern Orthodox Church's objection to his marrying his cousin, Natalia Satina, contributed to a period of severe depression.
He wrote little music over the following years, until he began a course of autosuggestive therapy with psychologist Nikolai Dahl, an amateur musician himself. Rachmaninov quickly recovered his confidence. An important result of these sessions was the composition of the Piano Concerto No. 2 (Op. 18, 1900–01), which was dedicated to Dr. Dahl. The piece was very well received at its premiere at which Rachmaninov was soloist, and remains one of his most popular compositions.
Rachmaninov's spirits were further bolstered when, after years of engagement, he was finally allowed to marry Natalia. They were married by an army priest in 1902, and their union lasted until the composer's death. After several successful appearances as a conductor, Rachmaninov was offered a job as conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1904, although political reasons led to his resignation two years later. In 1908, he moved to Italy, and later to Dresden, Germany, while waiting for the political situation in Russia to normalize.
Rachmaninov made his first tour of the United States as a pianist in 1909, an event for which he composed the Piano Concerto No. 3 (Op. 30, 1909). This successful tour made him a popular figure in America.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, which meant the end of the old Russia, Rachmaninov and his family left for Stockholm in December of 1917, and never returned to the home country afterwards. They settled then in Denmark for a year, and finally started a 10 days voyage from Oslo to New York on November 1, 1918, which marked the beginning of the American period of the composer's life. After Rachmaninov's departure, his music was banned in the Soviet Union for several years. His compositional output slowed, partly because he was required to spend much of his time performing to support his family, but mainly because of homesickness; he felt that, when he left Russia, it was as if he had left behind his inspiration.
The falloff in Rachmaninov's output was dramatic. Between 1892 and 1917 (mainly living in Russia), Rachmaninov wrote 39 compositions with opus numbers. Between 1918 and his death in 1943, mainly living in the U.S., he completed only six.
As the years went on, and he became more and more aware of the fact that he would never again return to his beloved homeland, he was overwhelmed with melancholia. Most people who knew him later in life described him as the saddest man they had ever known. Nevertheless, his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, today one of his best-known works, was written in Switzerland in 1934.
He went on to compose his Symphony No. 3 (Op. 44, 1935–36) and the Symphonic Dances (Op. 45, 1940), his last completed work. He fell ill during a concert tour in late 1942, and was subsequently diagnosed with advanced melanoma.
Rachmaninov and his wife became American citizens on 1 February 1943. His last recital, given on 17 February, 1943 at the University of Tennessee Alumni Gymnasium, prophetically featured Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor which contains the famous funeral march. A statue commemorating Rachmaninov's last concert stands in the World's Fair Park in Knoxville, TN.
Rachmaninov died on March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California, just a few days before his 70th birthday, and was interred in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In the final hours of his life, he insisted he could hear music playing somewhere nearby. After being repeatedly assured that was not the case, he said: "Then it is in my head".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Rachmaninoff
Rachmaninov is regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. He had legendary technical facilities and rhythmic drive, and his large hands were able to cover the interval of a thirteenth on the keyboard (a hand span of approximately twelve inches). His large handspan roughly corresponded with his height; Rachmaninov was 6 feet 6 inches (1.98m) tall according to sources[citation needed]. He also had the ability to play complex compositions upon first hearing. Many recordings were made by the Victor Talking Machine Company recording label of Rachmaninov's performing his own music, as well as works from the standard repertory.
His reputation as a composer, on the other hand, has generated controversy since his death. The 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians notoriously dismissed his music as "monotonous in texture ... consist[ing] mainly of artificial and gushing tunes ..." and predicted that his popular success was "not likely to last". [1] To this, Harold C. Schoenberg, in his Lives of the Great Composers, responded, "It is one of the most outrageously snobbish and even stupid statements ever to be found in a work that is supposed to be an objective reference." Indeed, not only have Rachmaninov's works become part of the standard repertory, but their popularity among both musicians and audiences had, if anything, increased during the second half of the twentieth century, with some of his symphonies and other orchestral works, songs and choral music recognized as masterpieces alongside the more familiar piano works.
His compositions include, among others, four piano concerti, three symphonies, two piano sonatas, three operas, a choral symphony (The Bells, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe), the All-Night Vigil for unaccompanied choir (often known as Rachmaninov's Vespers), the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, 24 Preludes (including the famous Prelude in C-sharp minor), 17 Études-tableaux, Symphonic Dances and many songs, of which the most famous is the wordless Vocalise. Most of his pieces are in a melancholy, late Romantic style akin to Tchaikovsky, although strong influences of Chopin and Liszt are apparent. Further inspiration included the music of Balakirev (Милий Алексеевич Балакирев), Mussorgsky (Модест Петрович Мусоргский), Medtner (Николай Карлович Метнер)(whom he considered the greatest contemporary composer and who, according to Schoenberg's Lives, returned the compliment by imitating him) and Henselt.
Rachmaninov was born in Semyonovo, near Novgorod in north-western Russia, into a noble family of Tatar descent, who had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century. His parents were both amateur pianists, and he had his first piano lessons with his mother on their family estate at Oneg; however, his parents noticed no outstanding talent in the youngster. Because of financial difficulties, the family moved to Saint Petersburg, where Rachmaninov studied at the Conservatory before moving to Moscow. There, he studied piano under Nikolay Zverev and Alexander Siloti (who was his cousin and a former student of Franz Liszt). He also studied harmony under Anton Arensky, and counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev. It should be noted that, in his younger days, Rachmaninov was found to be quite lazy, failing most of his classes and spending much time skating. It was the strict regime of the Zverev home (a place for many young musicians, including Scriabin) that instilled discipline in the boy.
Already, in his early years, he showed great skill in composition. While still a student, he wrote the one-act opera, Aleko (for which he was awarded a gold medal in composition), his first piano concerto and a set of piano pieces, Morceaux de Fantaisie (Op. 3, 1892), including the popular and famous Prelude in C-sharp minor. (According to Francis Crociata’s liner notes to RCA's 10-CD set of Rachmaninov’s recordings, the composer later became annoyed by the public’s fascination with this piece, composed when he was just 19. He would often tease an expectant audience by asking, “Oh, must I?” or claiming inability to remember anything else.) Rachmaninov confided in Zverev his desire to compose more, requesting a private room where he could compose in silence, but Zverev saw him only as a pianist and severed his links with the boy. After the success of Aleko, however, Zverev welcomed him back as a composer and pianist. His first serious pieces for the piano were composed and performed as a student, at the age of thirteen, during his residence with Zverev. In 1892, at nineteen, he completed his Piano Concerto No. 1 (Op. 1, 1891), which he revised in 1917.
Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 1 (Op. 13, 1896) premiered on 27 March 1897 in one of a long-running series of "Russian Symphony Concerts", but was torn apart by critics. In a particularly vitriolic review by César Cui, it was likened to a depiction of the seven plagues of Egypt and suggested that it would be admired by the "inmates" of a music conservatory in hell. It is often mooted that the criticisms stem from inadequacy of the performance. The conducting of Alexander Glazunov is often remembered as a problem: he liked the piece, but was a weak conductor and starved of rehearsal time. Rachmaninov's wife later suggested that Glazunov may have been drunk and, although this was never intimated by Rachmaninov, it would not seem out of character. The disastrous reception, coupled with his distress over the Eastern Orthodox Church's objection to his marrying his cousin, Natalia Satina, contributed to a period of severe depression.
He wrote little music over the following years, until he began a course of autosuggestive therapy with psychologist Nikolai Dahl, an amateur musician himself. Rachmaninov quickly recovered his confidence. An important result of these sessions was the composition of the Piano Concerto No. 2 (Op. 18, 1900–01), which was dedicated to Dr. Dahl. The piece was very well received at its premiere at which Rachmaninov was soloist, and remains one of his most popular compositions.
Rachmaninov's spirits were further bolstered when, after years of engagement, he was finally allowed to marry Natalia. They were married by an army priest in 1902, and their union lasted until the composer's death. After several successful appearances as a conductor, Rachmaninov was offered a job as conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1904, although political reasons led to his resignation two years later. In 1908, he moved to Italy, and later to Dresden, Germany, while waiting for the political situation in Russia to normalize.
Rachmaninov made his first tour of the United States as a pianist in 1909, an event for which he composed the Piano Concerto No. 3 (Op. 30, 1909). This successful tour made him a popular figure in America.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, which meant the end of the old Russia, Rachmaninov and his family left for Stockholm in December of 1917, and never returned to the home country afterwards. They settled then in Denmark for a year, and finally started a 10 days voyage from Oslo to New York on November 1, 1918, which marked the beginning of the American period of the composer's life. After Rachmaninov's departure, his music was banned in the Soviet Union for several years. His compositional output slowed, partly because he was required to spend much of his time performing to support his family, but mainly because of homesickness; he felt that, when he left Russia, it was as if he had left behind his inspiration.
The falloff in Rachmaninov's output was dramatic. Between 1892 and 1917 (mainly living in Russia), Rachmaninov wrote 39 compositions with opus numbers. Between 1918 and his death in 1943, mainly living in the U.S., he completed only six.
As the years went on, and he became more and more aware of the fact that he would never again return to his beloved homeland, he was overwhelmed with melancholia. Most people who knew him later in life described him as the saddest man they had ever known. Nevertheless, his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, today one of his best-known works, was written in Switzerland in 1934.
He went on to compose his Symphony No. 3 (Op. 44, 1935–36) and the Symphonic Dances (Op. 45, 1940), his last completed work. He fell ill during a concert tour in late 1942, and was subsequently diagnosed with advanced melanoma.
Rachmaninov and his wife became American citizens on 1 February 1943. His last recital, given on 17 February, 1943 at the University of Tennessee Alumni Gymnasium, prophetically featured Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor which contains the famous funeral march. A statue commemorating Rachmaninov's last concert stands in the World's Fair Park in Knoxville, TN.
Rachmaninov died on March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California, just a few days before his 70th birthday, and was interred in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In the final hours of his life, he insisted he could hear music playing somewhere nearby. After being repeatedly assured that was not the case, he said: "Then it is in my head".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Rachmaninoff
Études-tableaux Op.39
Sergei Rachmaninoff Lyrics
We have lyrics for these tracks by Sergei Rachmaninoff:
nocturne ор.15 no. 2 in f sharp major Luôn bên em là tôi Lâu nay không chút thay đổi Thế…
The lyrics are frequently found in the comments by searching or by filtering for lyric videos
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@mariodisarli1022
Ah, Rachmaninoff & Yuja?! The Classical Review
Wang’s powerful virtuosity stronger on flash than depth in Boston recital
May 13, 2018
By Aaron Keebaugh
Yuja Wang performed Friday night at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series. Photo: Robert Torres
...
There is no doubting Yuja Wang’s technique at the keyboard. The Chinese-born pianist is capable of unleashing torrents of octave runs, and her left-hand figures supply an almost orchestral sense of depth and gravity to her sound. She clearly shapes every phrase, and her notes resonate with a ping.
...
Still, there were times Friday night when one wondered if Wang only saw some of this music as just showpieces for her mesmerizing technical skill. Her selections of Rachmaninoff Preludes and Études-tableaux, though played deftly, didn’t always flower with the vocal quality so integral to the composer’s style.
Wang takes a full-bodied approach to Rachmaninoff, and she renders his textures in multi-dimensional shapes. In the Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, her strong left hand figures tethered the march rhythms to the ground. The Prelude in B minor, Op. 32, No. 10 unfolded in Debussyian washes of color. In the Étude-tableau in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5, Wang’s harmonies and bass lines crashed together in blistering clusters. But in each, Rachmaninoff sense of sweeping grandeur went largely unexplored.
Three of Ligeti’s Etudes, which filled out the program, were similarly muscular but lacking in probing musicality. Wang’s running chromatic figures blurred into a fog in Etude No. 9, “Vertige,” and in Etude No. 1, “Désordre,” churning Bartókian rhythms propelled the music ever forward. In Etude No. 3, “Touches bloquées,” Wang’s performance needed more of the intimacy that this music requires. Though Wang played the work quickly—as marked—the Etude’s halo-like harmonics, caused by the pianist keeping some of the keys depressed with the left hand while punching out syncopated figures with the right, failed to shimmer. Ligeti incorporated difficult passages into these works not as vehicles for showboating but to create ethereal musical tapestries. And throughout, it seemed as if Wang was playing Ligeti’s notes, not Ligeti’s music.
...
The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Thursday night at Carnegie Hall in New York. carnegiehall.org.
@mariodisarli1022
The New York Times Review. Yuja Wang Plays Dazed Chaos, Then 7 Encores By Zachary Woolfe May 18, 2018 The usual praise for a musician who plays a recital in a big hall is that he or she makes that big hall feel small.
But on Thursday, the pianist Yuja Wang made Carnegie Hall seem even vaster than normal: big, empty, lonely. Through her concert’s uncompromisingly grim first half and its wary, stunned second, Ms. Wang charted wholly dark, private emotions. She was in no way hostile toward an adoring (if slightly disoriented) audience, but neither did she seem at all interested in seducing it.
After the playbills had been printed, Ms. Wang — who will have a Perspectives series at Carnegie next season — revised her program. She subtracted two of the four Rachmaninoff preludes she’d planned to give before intermission and added an extra three of his later, even less scrutable Études-Tableaux. Ms. Wang played none of these pieces in a way that made them seem grounded or orderly; she even seemed to want to run the seven together in an unbroken, heady minor-key span, a choice that most — but not enough — of the audience respected by not clapping in between.
Even divided by light applause, these pieces blurred into and stretched toward one another. Doing nothing that felt exaggerated or overwrought, Ms. Wang emphasized unsettled harmonies and de-emphasized melodic integrity. The Étude-Tableau, in E-flat Minor (Op. 33, No. 6) wasn’t the juxtaposition of one hand’s abstraction and the other’s clear etching. No, she was telling two surreal tales at once. The martial opening of the Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23, No. 5) 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, and the 19th century finally ended.) The stretched-out, washed-out quality of melancholy in her account of the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 33, No. 3), 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 — continued in what followed. The relentless trills and tremolos of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 10 — which is sometimes played lusciously but was here diffuse and gauzy — glittered angrily. Three Ligeti etudes from the 1980s and ’90s proved that Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as she presented them, were presentiments of the modernism of the distant future.
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, playing with guarded poise, 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 contours were sharper now, the colors brighter and bolder. The effect was still unnerving.
I considered whether Ms. Wang’s flamboyant clothes — in the first half, a floor-length purple gown with only a slash of sparkle covering her breasts; in the second, a tiny iridescent turquoise dress with vertiginous heels — were the right costume here. They did give the impression that she had arrived alone, a disconcerting combination of powerful and vulnerable, at a not particularly appealing party. In that sense they were a fitting complement to her ominous vision of this music.
Likewise, it seemed at first that a few of her seven — yes, seven — encores jarred with the forlorn mood she’d built up. Vladimir Horowitz’s “Carmen” fantasia, an Art Tatum stride version of “Tea for Two,” a demented arrangement of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” — all were blazingly performed but had a touch of cheerful kitsch about them. But perhaps they, too, were of a piece with the intoxication that permeated the recital.
...
And by the end, as she followed the “Mélodie” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” with Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Ms. Wang finally seemed to have found a measure of real, hard-earned peace.
@mariodisarli1022
Ah, Rachmaninoff & Yuja?! The Classical Review
Wang’s powerful virtuosity stronger on flash than depth in Boston recital
May 13, 2018
By Aaron Keebaugh
Yuja Wang performed Friday night at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series. Photo: Robert Torres
...
There is no doubting Yuja Wang’s technique at the keyboard. The Chinese-born pianist is capable of unleashing torrents of octave runs, and her left-hand figures supply an almost orchestral sense of depth and gravity to her sound. She clearly shapes every phrase, and her notes resonate with a ping.
...
Still, there were times Friday night when one wondered if Wang only saw some of this music as just showpieces for her mesmerizing technical skill. Her selections of Rachmaninoff Preludes and Études-tableaux, though played deftly, didn’t always flower with the vocal quality so integral to the composer’s style.
Wang takes a full-bodied approach to Rachmaninoff, and she renders his textures in multi-dimensional shapes. In the Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, her strong left hand figures tethered the march rhythms to the ground. The Prelude in B minor, Op. 32, No. 10 unfolded in Debussyian washes of color. In the Étude-tableau in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5, Wang’s harmonies and bass lines crashed together in blistering clusters. But in each, Rachmaninoff sense of sweeping grandeur went largely unexplored.
Three of Ligeti’s Etudes, which filled out the program, were similarly muscular but lacking in probing musicality. Wang’s running chromatic figures blurred into a fog in Etude No. 9, “Vertige,” and in Etude No. 1, “Désordre,” churning Bartókian rhythms propelled the music ever forward. In Etude No. 3, “Touches bloquées,” Wang’s performance needed more of the intimacy that this music requires. Though Wang played the work quickly—as marked—the Etude’s halo-like harmonics, caused by the pianist keeping some of the keys depressed with the left hand while punching out syncopated figures with the right, failed to shimmer. Ligeti incorporated difficult passages into these works not as vehicles for showboating but to create ethereal musical tapestries. And throughout, it seemed as if Wang was playing Ligeti’s notes, not Ligeti’s music.
...
The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Thursday night at Carnegie Hall in New York. carnegiehall.org.
@mariodisarli1022
The New York Times Review. Yuja Wang Plays Dazed Chaos, Then 7 Encores By Zachary Woolfe May 18, 2018 The usual praise for a musician who plays a recital in a big hall is that he or she makes that big hall feel small.
But on Thursday, the pianist Yuja Wang made Carnegie Hall seem even vaster than normal: big, empty, lonely. Through her concert’s uncompromisingly grim first half and its wary, stunned second, Ms. Wang charted wholly dark, private emotions. She was in no way hostile toward an adoring (if slightly disoriented) audience, but neither did she seem at all interested in seducing it.
After the playbills had been printed, Ms. Wang — who will have a Perspectives series at Carnegie next season — revised her program. She subtracted two of the four Rachmaninoff preludes she’d planned to give before intermission and added an extra three of his later, even less scrutable Études-Tableaux. Ms. Wang played none of these pieces in a way that made them seem grounded or orderly; she even seemed to want to run the seven together in an unbroken, heady minor-key span, a choice that most — but not enough — of the audience respected by not clapping in between.
Even divided by light applause, these pieces blurred into and stretched toward one another. Doing nothing that felt exaggerated or overwrought, Ms. Wang emphasized unsettled harmonies and de-emphasized melodic integrity. The Étude-Tableau, in E-flat Minor (Op. 33, No. 6) wasn’t the juxtaposition of one hand’s abstraction and the other’s clear etching. No, she was telling two surreal tales at once. The martial opening of the Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23, No. 5) 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, and the 19th century finally ended.) The stretched-out, washed-out quality of melancholy in her account of the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 33, No. 3), 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 — continued in what followed. The relentless trills and tremolos of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 10 — which is sometimes played lusciously but was here diffuse and gauzy — glittered angrily. Three Ligeti etudes from the 1980s and ’90s proved that Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as she presented them, were presentiments of the modernism of the distant future.
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, playing with guarded poise, 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 contours were sharper now, the colors brighter and bolder. The effect was still unnerving.
I considered whether Ms. Wang’s flamboyant clothes — in the first half, a floor-length purple gown with only a slash of sparkle covering her breasts; in the second, a tiny iridescent turquoise dress with vertiginous heels — were the right costume here. They did give the impression that she had arrived alone, a disconcerting combination of powerful and vulnerable, at a not particularly appealing party. In that sense they were a fitting complement to her ominous vision of this music.
Likewise, it seemed at first that a few of her seven — yes, seven — encores jarred with the forlorn mood she’d built up. Vladimir Horowitz’s “Carmen” fantasia, an Art Tatum stride version of “Tea for Two,” a demented arrangement of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” — all were blazingly performed but had a touch of cheerful kitsch about them. But perhaps they, too, were of a piece with the intoxication that permeated the recital.
...
And by the end, as she followed the “Mélodie” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” with Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Ms. Wang finally seemed to have found a measure of real, hard-earned peace.
@mariodisarli1022
Ah, Rachmaninoff & Yuja?! The Classical Review
Wang’s powerful virtuosity stronger on flash than depth in Boston recital
May 13, 2018
By Aaron Keebaugh
Yuja Wang performed Friday night at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series. Photo: Robert Torres
...
There is no doubting Yuja Wang’s technique at the keyboard. The Chinese-born pianist is capable of unleashing torrents of octave runs, and her left-hand figures supply an almost orchestral sense of depth and gravity to her sound. She clearly shapes every phrase, and her notes resonate with a ping.
...
Still, there were times Friday night when one wondered if Wang only saw some of this music as just showpieces for her mesmerizing technical skill. Her selections of Rachmaninoff Preludes and Études-tableaux, though played deftly, didn’t always flower with the vocal quality so integral to the composer’s style.
Wang takes a full-bodied approach to Rachmaninoff, and she renders his textures in multi-dimensional shapes. In the Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, her strong left hand figures tethered the march rhythms to the ground. The Prelude in B minor, Op. 32, No. 10 unfolded in Debussyian washes of color. In the Étude-tableau in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5, Wang’s harmonies and bass lines crashed together in blistering clusters. But in each, Rachmaninoff sense of sweeping grandeur went largely unexplored.
Three of Ligeti’s Etudes, which filled out the program, were similarly muscular but lacking in probing musicality. Wang’s running chromatic figures blurred into a fog in Etude No. 9, “Vertige,” and in Etude No. 1, “Désordre,” churning Bartókian rhythms propelled the music ever forward. In Etude No. 3, “Touches bloquées,” Wang’s performance needed more of the intimacy that this music requires. Though Wang played the work quickly—as marked—the Etude’s halo-like harmonics, caused by the pianist keeping some of the keys depressed with the left hand while punching out syncopated figures with the right, failed to shimmer. Ligeti incorporated difficult passages into these works not as vehicles for showboating but to create ethereal musical tapestries. And throughout, it seemed as if Wang was playing Ligeti’s notes, not Ligeti’s music.
...
The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Thursday night at Carnegie Hall in New York. carnegiehall.org.
@mariodisarli1022
The New York Times Review. Yuja Wang Plays Dazed Chaos, Then 7 Encores By Zachary Woolfe May 18, 2018 The usual praise for a musician who plays a recital in a big hall is that he or she makes that big hall feel small.
But on Thursday, the pianist Yuja Wang made Carnegie Hall seem even vaster than normal: big, empty, lonely. Through her concert’s uncompromisingly grim first half and its wary, stunned second, Ms. Wang charted wholly dark, private emotions. She was in no way hostile toward an adoring (if slightly disoriented) audience, but neither did she seem at all interested in seducing it.
After the playbills had been printed, Ms. Wang — who will have a Perspectives series at Carnegie next season — revised her program. She subtracted two of the four Rachmaninoff preludes she’d planned to give before intermission and added an extra three of his later, even less scrutable Études-Tableaux. Ms. Wang played none of these pieces in a way that made them seem grounded or orderly; she even seemed to want to run the seven together in an unbroken, heady minor-key span, a choice that most — but not enough — of the audience respected by not clapping in between.
Even divided by light applause, these pieces blurred into and stretched toward one another. Doing nothing that felt exaggerated or overwrought, Ms. Wang emphasized unsettled harmonies and de-emphasized melodic integrity. The Étude-Tableau, in E-flat Minor (Op. 33, No. 6) wasn’t the juxtaposition of one hand’s abstraction and the other’s clear etching. No, she was telling two surreal tales at once. The martial opening of the Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23, No. 5) 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, and the 19th century finally ended.) The stretched-out, washed-out quality of melancholy in her account of the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 33, No. 3), 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 — continued in what followed. The relentless trills and tremolos of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 10 — which is sometimes played lusciously but was here diffuse and gauzy — glittered angrily. Three Ligeti etudes from the 1980s and ’90s proved that Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as she presented them, were presentiments of the modernism of the distant future.
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, playing with guarded poise, 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 contours were sharper now, the colors brighter and bolder. The effect was still unnerving.
I considered whether Ms. Wang’s flamboyant clothes — in the first half, a floor-length purple gown with only a slash of sparkle covering her breasts; in the second, a tiny iridescent turquoise dress with vertiginous heels — were the right costume here. They did give the impression that she had arrived alone, a disconcerting combination of powerful and vulnerable, at a not particularly appealing party. In that sense they were a fitting complement to her ominous vision of this music.
Likewise, it seemed at first that a few of her seven — yes, seven — encores jarred with the forlorn mood she’d built up. Vladimir Horowitz’s “Carmen” fantasia, an Art Tatum stride version of “Tea for Two,” a demented arrangement of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” — all were blazingly performed but had a touch of cheerful kitsch about them. But perhaps they, too, were of a piece with the intoxication that permeated the recital.
...
And by the end, as she followed the “Mélodie” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” with Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Ms. Wang finally seemed to have found a measure of real, hard-earned peace.
@geofffreeburn868
Yuja has mastered the greatest of the Russian composers, she is beyond world class this lady.
@ciararespect4296
She's average
@ciararespect4296
@Martynand those that use trite sayings haven't a clue
@theone4026
@ciara respect why are you describing yourself
@jnmusic9969
What I love about this interpretation is that you don’t hear every individual note of the right hand, it focuses on the melody in the left hand
@user-zd1pt8gy9l
Yuja Wang always divine plays Rachmaninov with incredible brilliance - is interpretation of extraordinary beauty with a rich color palette of sound. . .
@TimothyChiangPianist
Really wonderful playing! Very natural feel for the music, even a lot of high level pianists play this too mechanically
@ciararespect4296
This was very mechanical. She's not bad but no Ashkenazy for instance
@789armstrong
Yuja is quite simply astonishing. She plays every composer superbly. This Etude Tableaux never sounded better, although the supreme tests are in the two D minor Etudes and the E flat minor opus 39 #5.
@mariodisarli1022
Ah, Rachmaninoff & Yuja?! The Classical Review
Wang’s powerful virtuosity stronger on flash than depth in Boston recital
May 13, 2018
By Aaron Keebaugh
Yuja Wang performed Friday night at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series. Photo: Robert Torres
...
There is no doubting Yuja Wang’s technique at the keyboard. The Chinese-born pianist is capable of unleashing torrents of octave runs, and her left-hand figures supply an almost orchestral sense of depth and gravity to her sound. She clearly shapes every phrase, and her notes resonate with a ping.
...
Still, there were times Friday night when one wondered if Wang only saw some of this music as just showpieces for her mesmerizing technical skill. Her selections of Rachmaninoff Preludes and Études-tableaux, though played deftly, didn’t always flower with the vocal quality so integral to the composer’s style.
Wang takes a full-bodied approach to Rachmaninoff, and she renders his textures in multi-dimensional shapes. In the Prelude in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5, her strong left hand figures tethered the march rhythms to the ground. The Prelude in B minor, Op. 32, No. 10 unfolded in Debussyian washes of color. In the Étude-tableau in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5, Wang’s harmonies and bass lines crashed together in blistering clusters. But in each, Rachmaninoff sense of sweeping grandeur went largely unexplored.
Three of Ligeti’s Etudes, which filled out the program, were similarly muscular but lacking in probing musicality. Wang’s running chromatic figures blurred into a fog in Etude No. 9, “Vertige,” and in Etude No. 1, “Désordre,” churning Bartókian rhythms propelled the music ever forward. In Etude No. 3, “Touches bloquées,” Wang’s performance needed more of the intimacy that this music requires. Though Wang played the work quickly—as marked—the Etude’s halo-like harmonics, caused by the pianist keeping some of the keys depressed with the left hand while punching out syncopated figures with the right, failed to shimmer. Ligeti incorporated difficult passages into these works not as vehicles for showboating but to create ethereal musical tapestries. And throughout, it seemed as if Wang was playing Ligeti’s notes, not Ligeti’s music.
...
The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Thursday night at Carnegie Hall in New York. carnegiehall.org.