Me: yes
Aunt: I’m trying to get a ticket for you for yuja’s concert tonight
Me: cool. If there’s an extra ticket, I can write about HKC's student for my next chapter.
5 minutes later....
Aunt: meet me at the restaurant trattoria dell’arte across the street from Carnegie hall. Be sure to dress up. We’ll get you backstage
Me: I’ll see you
the hall was packed.
i sat in upper balcony left in anticipation. my aunt and uncle were sitting on
the stage behind the piano. before the concert began, the lights went dim. then
an unexpected voice came over the speaker system. "This is Yuja. for
tonight's performance we will not be following the program. I believe that
every program is a living organism, so it should be in sync with how I’m
feeling in that moment, so it is truly alive. I want the music to surprise me
and to surprise the audience. this concert is for all the senses. keep an open
mind. enjoy the ride."
in setting up
previous recital setlists, Yuja revealed, "It’s actually quite
excruciating because you’re kind of like a director—for a movie, an opera,
whatever—and you want to tell a story. You want to bring people on a journey.
At the same time, there’s a balance between what actually interests me and what
would be interesting for the audience. And there’s also a balance between
quality and curiosity." switching the playlist right before the concert
reminded me of the story when Renoir and Matisse once got together to paint a
bouquet of flowers. Renoir was 40 years Matisse’s senior. Matisse arranged the
flowers and started to paint. Renoir said “You’re doing it all wrong”. Matisse
replied” What’s wrong” “whenever I arrange a bouquet, I set it down on the table
and right before I’m about to paint it, I turn the vase ½ way around. That way
my view is not biased by my act of arrangement. The painter and object have no
connection, he just paints an unfamiliar object and can paint with startling
reality without prejudging his subject."
like the rest of the
audience, i surrendered to yuja’s musical voyage. I didn’t know what to expect.
In news articles, critics often commented on her attire “She looked like a
dominatrix... She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman
in sadistic high heels.” from the upper reaches of the balcony 137 steps up
from the entry foyer, yuja appeared to be the size of a postage stamp. i could
tell she was wearing a white gown for the first half and then a green gown for
the second half, but that's it. luckily, the acoustics in the hall make audio
far more legible than visual. in his efforts to optimize acoustic performance,
carnegie hall’s architect and amateur cellist, william burnett tuthill,
surveyed european concert halls famous for their acoustics and consulted louis
sullivan's firm. with his findings, he eliminated the usual heavy curtains,
frescoed walls, and chandeliers that could impair good sound distribution. the
interior is smooth and elliptical in shape, with a frontal arch and domed
ceiling specifically designed to project soft and loud tones to the balcony
where i was sitting.
whether intentional
or not, the first half of the concert was an interesting transect in classical
music slicing through space and time. yuja circled geographically from
Italy-> Russia-> France -> Spain -> Russia -> Germany while fast
forwarding chronologically from 1706 to 1987 before rewinding back to 1685: 1.
GALUPPI Andante from Keyboard Sonata in C Major 2. SCRIABIN Piano Sonata No. 5,
Op. 53 3. RAVEL "Une barque sur l'océan" from Miroirs 4. MOMPOU
"Secreto" from Impresiones intimas 5. SCRIABIN Piano Sonata No. 4,
Op. 30 6. BACH Toccata in C Minor, BWV 911. delving deeper into the composers'
lives, i found their real life journeys connected them in time and space.
galuppi was invited from venice to russia by catherine the great for 3 years.
scriabin went from russia to paris. ravel composed his miroirs in paris. mompou
left barcelona for paris to study under faure and the impressionists. and
scriabin left paris and traveled extensively through bach's homeland, germany,
before returning to russia.
yuja introduced me
to pieces i never heard of with interpretations that were so fresh and exciting
i wanted to hear these pieces again. i hate when people try to write about
classical music in some flowery manner. so i'll limit my recount of her first 6
songs with 6 observations:
1. she played galuppi's simple melody very delicately and lightly thereby
forcing the audience to pay attention... her white dress pairing nicely with
the music.
2. any sense of tranquility ended abruptly with scriabin's thunderous entry
in sonata 5 which sounded volatile
and moody like his poem which he appended to his score: "I call you to life, O mysterious
forces! Drowned in the obscure depths Of the creative spirit, timid, Shadows of
life, to you I bring audacity"
3. yuja then painted ravel's soundscape of a boat floating and gently
rocking on ocean waves with effortless sweeping arpeggios
4. in secreto, which was composed by mompou who described himself as “a man
of few words and composer of few notes… music is written for the inexpressible,
it should seem to come out of the shadow in order to move back in to the
shadow" yuja offered a zen-like minimalist poem treasuring silence as much
as sound
5. scriabin's no. 4 sonata provided the fireworks and spirit for the finale
again encapsulated by a poem he penned on the score, "In a light mist,
transparent vapor Lost afar and yet distinct A star gleams
softly. How beautiful! The bluish mystery Of her glow Beckons me, cradles me. O
bring me to thee, far distant star!
6. bach's tocata was played with a possessed rhythmic drive, as if played
by scriabin in a modern manner. just as precedents influence and
inspire new music, new music influences how we view and interpret precedents.
after a series of
encores, i descended from my perch and went to meet my aunt and uncle. my aunt
had placed my name on the backstage access list. in the back of carnegie hall
are steps. you give your name to a guy holding a list. once confirmed, you take
stairs down to an elevator that gives access to dressing rooms above. exiting
the elevator you see posters of beatles concert 2/12/1964 and photographs of
gershwin lining the halls. since its opening in 1891 with tchaikovsky
conducting his own pieces in his first and only trip to america, the hall has
been host to classical music performances by greats such as horowitz, heifetz,
and bernstein. today's celebrity in a sparkly green dress stood before me
surrounded by dozens of people vying for pictures. yuja wang.
while i waited with
my aunt to have our picture taken with yuja, i asked my aunt some very basic
questions. "wait, how did you meet her again?" "she came to
calgary for a music festival when she was 12, and then stayed with us 3 years
during summers and easter breaks." "how can you tell if a kid is
talented at that age?" "we knew when we first heard her"
"how can you play piano and express a range of emotions when you don't
have life experiences at 12 years old?" "she had an 'old soul'. she's
so smart. i showed her book by feynman about physics and told her to ask me
questions. she wrote down questions and asked me. she's very bright!"
when i was finally
introduced, i was taken aback by yuja's cackling laughter and uncontrolled
energy. in my mind i think of classical music players as stuffy conservative
people, yuja was anything but. she was flamboyant and restless... which in
retrospect was fitting for a pianist who has the power to breathe fresh life
into songs. she must have to deal with annoying questions over and over. ‘Are
you single?’ ‘How do you memorize your pieces?’ ‘How do you pedal with your
high heels?’ ‘Who do you buy your dresses from?’ ‘Why do you wear short dresses?’
‘Why do you wear long dresses?’ ‘Why do you have short hair?’ ‘Do you like
travelling?’ ‘Why don’t you play more Prokofiev?’ and so on.... i didn't ask
anything. as a guy with absolutely little knowledge of classical music, i
followed mark twain's advice all night long, "better to remain silent and
be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
sitting in her dressing room were gary graffman,
my aunt and uncle, and another piano teacher from curtis. i probably looked
like a quite an odd fool. my aunt and i were making busy by scavenging left
over fruit and vegetable platters and chocolate bars. "you played the bach
tocatta faster than anyone in the universe" my aunt complimented while
chomping on a carrot stick. "i just thought to play it that way cause
there was a broken string," yuja replied. i remember she walked to the
back of the piano after intermission, but didn't know she was pushing piano string back into position. "why
did you have your hand up during the intro?" my aunt asked. i thought yuja
was showboating by playing the whole intro with her left hand and raising her
right theatrically. yuja replied, "it's the beginning of the theme and
someone is snoring! i put my hand up and thought... please don't let me mess
up."
while yuja was talking to others, my aunt
reminisced about yuja's time in calgary... i could tell she was like a daughter
to my aunt. "she loved when HKC was away. she would sleep in
my bed cause she was scared of the dark. and now she's a fearless pianist, can
you believe that?" later it was fun to see the two giggling like girls and
lighting up forbidden cigarettes and laughing as we walked down 57th street.
"when i
changed from a white dress to a green glittering dress someone told me
you look like a peacock." yuja joked. she then changed out of her green
gown into tight fitting black dress. heading out of the concert hall on our way
to eat, we pass a dozen people who had waited an hour in the cold for
autographs and a chance to catch a brief glimpse of yuja on her way out.
at trattoria dell arte, graffman sat next to his
prized student and ordered twin margaritas with salt for the two. she ordered a
filet minon rare while he ordered a vegetable plate. she is 33 entering the
prime of her career selling out carnegie hall, and he is 90 looking so happy
for her success. i am a fly on the wall, meeting people at the top of their
fields. an architect amongst a group of some of the finest pianists in the
world. it becomes clear to me, cultivating piano talent depends on mentorship,
guidance, and personal relationships: insights and wisdom passed from one
generation to another. tracing pianist lineages the next day, i would find yuja
studied under graffman who studied with isabelle vengerova who studied with
thedor leschetizky who studed with carl czerny who was one of beethoven's
pupils. from these lineages come interesting branching connections. in an
interview, graffman recounted, “Horowitz was a friend of Vengerova. In those
days many orchestras had broadcasts of their concerts. He had heard me on the
radio and said he’d be delighted to hear me play. So she gave me his phone
number.” “What was that experience like?” “It worked out that I played for him
about once a week for a year, and then about once a month for three or four years
after that. But although I only saw him once a week, or later, once a month, I
was supposed to call him every day at 6:05 PM. He didn’t want to miss the five
minute news broadcast at 6 on WQXR. I now realize that Horowitz influenced the
way I still teach today. He would sometimes tell me when he thought I was on
the wrong track. But mostly, he would criticize me on the basis of what he
thought I was aiming for, but not completely achieving; how I could make it
better, but MY WAY, not his. He didn’t want to be copied. He would ask me, for
example, with the second theme of the Chopin G Minor Ballade, ‘If you were a
singer, where would you breathe?’ Or ‘Where would a stringed instrument change
bows?"
the talk at the table centered around
competitions. graffman talked of competitions and how excellent pianists like
lang lang and yuja didn't need them. they were better off partnering with
conductors to procure gigs. preparations for competitions often stunt the
growth of pianists as they must focus on mastering singular pieces rather than
broadening their repertoire and trying new approaches. my aunt replied she was
going with my uncle to the rubinstein competition in israel in may. graffman
talked of scheduled trips to far flung places like the 'top of the world'
competition in tromso norway. he accepted that competition because he wanted to
see the arctic circle. next year, he hopes to judge a competition in malta.
after we drop off graffman at his apartment
across from carnegie hall, we head to yuja's apartment down the street on the
53rd floor. there's an open suitcase on the floor with 2 pianos filling half
the living room. an impromptu cardboard box serves as a trash. hundreds of
pairs of shoes completely fill a hallway closet. open her refrigerator you see
a dozen wine bottles of which someone broke out a cabernet sauvignon to
toast.
what do musicians talk about after concerts? they
talk about their students playing in competitions. conductor, E. tells a funny
story about how he once forgot to put his ipad on airplane mode and received a
facetime call during a performance. they talk about how people in the audience
fart or squeak their chairs at the most inopportune times. E. tell how he's
conducting janacek in front of an older audience, and "during a particularly
dramatic junction in the music, an old man in the back asks "does anyone
have a bandaid?" everyone puts their heads down and says to themselves
'don't laugh.'" yuja interjects "for the previous three scriabin 5
performances, someone has made a farting sound after the dramatic introductory
rumble." the group laughs. they talk about how people make piano faces to
engage the audience. they talk about how yuja made little accents in her
renditions of scriabin, and how they were nice touches to the music. yuja
brings up things nobody does.
my aunt, still fixated on the bach tocata said
"the tocatta was amazingly fast. super super fast" to which yuja
replied "really? i told myself to keep the tempo down, and play softer so
i could build it up." conductor E. sitting at the edge of the couch
interjected a "i noticed a 2 bar thing in the middle of the piece where
you did go faster." my aunt continued to heap the praise "your bach
was infused by god. you should play bach at every concert." this group
knew these pieces like the back of their hand. later over the weekend, I search
up bach to see if he wrote anything about writing his tocatta. nothing. but
there was a story from arond the time of the writing. apparently bach was
dissatisfied with the standard of singers in his choir. He called one of them a
"Zippel Fagottist" (weenie bassoon player). Late one evening this
student, named Geyersbach, went after Bach with a stick. Bach filed a complaint
against Geyersbach with the authorities. They acquitted Geyersbach with a minor
reprimand and ordered Bach to be more moderate regarding the musical qualities
he expected from his students. these composers probably have a ton of quirky
stories. then i wondered whether faggots are called bassoon players in german slang.
no. the german word for faggot is schwuchtel.
at 2 am, with a little more wine, the
conversation devolves around music critics and how they are the worst lot who
don't understand anything about music. everyone in the group talks of reviled
critics who i've never heard of. i get lost in their inside conversations.
"lebrecht... mark swed... damn slipped disc.... can't get their facts
straight... orange dress. doesn't even comment on my rach 3.. tells anyone
under 18 shouldn't attend this concert...."
the next day, i look up these idiots to get a
sense of their writing.
In 2011, Mark Swed, the music critic of the L.A.
Times, referring to the short and tight orange dress Yuja wore when she played
Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl, wrote that “had
there been any less of it, the Bowl might have been forced to restrict
admission to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult.”
i think it's not easy being a celebrity pianist.
it's obvious yuja is devoted to her craft. to get to her level, she probably
sacrifices so much and practices around the clock... and it's depressing people
become fixated over peripheral non-musical issues like her clothing selections.
in other yuja news, i read a week earlier,
during a sold-out show in vancouver, wang wore sunglasses. she did not
oblige an encore, leaving some in the audience to wonder what had happened to
make the pianist uncharacteristically angry.
On her instagram account, which reads
"Musician living life with curiosity & passion" her most recent
post deals with the controversial sunglass show. "On arrival at Vancouver
International Airport on Friday, I was detained for over an hour and subjected
to intense questioning which I found humiliating and deeply upsetting. I was
then released, giving me very little time to travel to the Chan Centre for the
Performing Arts. I was left extremely shaken by this experience.When I was
dropped off at the venue for my recital that evening, my eyes were still
visibly red and swollen from crying. I was in shock. Although I was traumatized
by what happened, I was determined not to cancel the recital, but to go ahead
with the performance and not to let the audience down, which included my dear
teacher Gary Graffman. I decided that wearing sunglasses was the only way to
prevent my distress from being seen, since I wasn’t yet prepared to make a
statement about what happened." she had joked the night before the violent
rumble of her scriabin 5 was her mowing down the order security guards...
i experience the dark side of classical music
trolling first hand when i start looking into ravel's piece that she played.
there's an interesting gouache entitled A boat on the ocean, which
belonged to Maurice Ravel, which shows a
three-masted sailboat in a seascape. in the bottom right hand corner is his
wave form arpeggios notated. ravel composed a a boat on the ocean in
1905, the same year as debussy debuted la mer. these Mirrors "form a
collection of pieces for piano which mark in my harmonic evolution a change
considerable enough to have taken aback the musicians most accustomed until
then in my way", writes Ravel in 1928 in his biographical sketch. it was
dedicated to the painter paul sordes.
i wanted to hear Ravel's piece again while
looking at the gouache, so i searched renditions of it by yuja online. Eusebius
et Florestan some nerd with 80 subscribers posted a illegal bootleg video
of it under "Florestan" and "Eusebius," the esoteric
fantasy names that Schumann gave to different sides of his own personality.
Florestan was Schumann's bold and impetuous side; Eusebius, the introspective
and dreamy side of the composer's imagination.
Eusebius et Florestan makes a deep poetic description under his
video: "A boat on the ocean... you can really feel the caress (sometimes
the squall) of the wind. The interpretation is of a scrupulous precision
(respecting in particular the dynamic nuances of the score). Yet it has all the
flexibility and smoothness of an improvisation."
a viewer Danny B. replies: "Incredible!"
to which Mario DiSarli retorts:
"Magic??? Fantastic??? Let's talk about Yuja Wang. I'm sure Yuja
will look great in her bikini dress! While the orchestra plays, the audience
would be particularly happy."
i take offense to how he denigrates yuja's craft
and provides links to her sexy walk and create an account to counter Mario
Disarli's stupid comment under fake name. when you're anonymous the purest
most intellectual thoughts are transmitted online. i wrote: "you fat walrus.
what kind of person makes a fake account? a person with no life?" i was
anticipating a spirited online conversation with Mario DiSarli, but within
30 minutes, my foray into classic music trolling was flagged inappropriate and
removed by Eusebius and Florestan. what a snob. i concluded the
classical music critic world is full of douchebags and fuckers just like me.
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