Yuja & Tarmo: Keep your eyes on these two
Keep your eyes on these two
It was a predictably packed Kennedy Center Concert Hall Thursday night; the refulgent pianist Yuja Wang was in the house, soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra. The world is still agog at her unprecedented and heretofore unimaginable feat earlier this year, in Carnegie Hall, when she played all four Rachmaninoff concertos and the Rhapsody in a single concert. Wang’s melding of high fashion, preternatural keyboard talent, and sex appeal is unlike any who came before her, and there was palpable excitement in the hall as we awaited The Entrance. (Her long magenta gown was relatively demure, at first, but when she took her seat on the bench, the lower half seemed to evaporate.)
And her playing was all we’ve come to expect. As a critic, I resist worshipping at any altars, and offer correctives whenever warranted against popular narratives about artists. But while I’ve certainly felt some of Wang’s performances of core repertoire were wanting in depth, the Bartók Piano Concerto No. 2, is squarely in her wheelhouse. I doubt if there’s a pianist alive who could make such a meal out of its ferocious demands; octaves and dense chords at lightning speed, leaps, double-trills, and thick contrapuntal passagework. The great Hungarian artist András Schiff said, "it's a finger-breaking piece. [It] is probably the single most difficult piece that I have ever played, and I usually end up with a keyboard covered by blood." Wang tossed everything off like it was Czerny, her technical efficiency simply stunning.
Of course, the crowd demanded encores, and she had the conductor join her for two Brahms Hungarian Dances (for four hands). Somewhat slapdash, but fun.
The guest conductor, Tarmo Peltokoski, 23 but looking about 18, was making his NSO debut. He is the latest in a long line of gifted conductors out of Finland’s Sibelius Academy, and his talent is intriguing indeed. He has already conducted a Ring cycle, and is music director of the Latvian National Symphony and the Orchestra Nationale du Capitol de Touluse. Peltokoski avoids common mistakes we often see from young conductors; many of his gestures are for the orchestra alone -- virtually invisible from the audience – and he sometimes stops beating time entirely, trusting the musicians. In the opening Meistersinger Prelude of Wagner, he did a good job minimizing bombast and balancing the competing voices (one of Wagner’s most contrapuntally-complex pieces), and it even seemed like I could hear the NSO strings at times. Some of Peltokski’s nuances went for naught during onslaughts from the brass, but the performance demonstrated impressive control overall.
In the Sibelius Symphony No. 1, though, his inexperience became more apparent. While we don’t expect a 23-year-old to offer vatic insights, Peltokoski could have displayed a firmer hand in build-ups to climaxes (sometimes more focused on the goal rather than the journey), led the orchestra better on accelerando passages (rather than just being a passenger), chosen more judicious tempos (the breathless Scherzo taxed the NSO winds, especially the little fugato in the middle), and paid a bit more attention to cross-rhythms (again in the Scherzo, which felt pretty one-dimensional). I will say, on the other side, that soft string passages glowed with unusually rich color. While this young man may’ve come too far too fast at first, with all his training and talent he will very likely turn into an important musician someday.
