Yuja Wang - Rachmaninov: Etudes Tableaux Op. 39, No. 1 in C-Minor (Live at Philharmonie, Berlin) 

Beautiful comment, Miguel 🎹

Imagine writting it with a quil and ink LOL

I feel the exact same as you... I'm so happy I was able to meet such music

She's average

@Martynand those that use trite sayings haven't a clue

​@@ciararespect4296 why are you describing yourself

I’ve done the same on many pieces . The beauty of RU-vid

Boris Giltburg makes this exact mistake in his recordings. Maybe the mistake is in your and Boris' score? Edit: Richter plays it this way also. I'm pretty convinced it's just a printing error

I’m crying 😭😭 I just looked at my score and realized IM ALSO PLAYING A FLAT INSTEAD OF NATURAL HAHAHAAAAA

@@chromz158Better find a professional teacher 😂 if not too expensive

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.

Google translation: "Berlin Berliner Morgenpost Kultur Kirill Petrenko conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker 15.04.2018, 03:00 Uhr Felix Stephan Top-Events in Berlin "... And Petrenko's most recent Philharmonic program also fits into this It moves exclusively in the first half of the 20th century, and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 is clearly the main attraction of the evening, especially as the Chinese Yuja Wang reaches into the keys, a pianist, half Circus horse, half machine, with a lurid record tempi in the outer sets and mercilessly accurate chord attacks.Whoever had always suspected that the piano is a drum kit, will feel confirmed by Yuja Wang." ...

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.

Gramophone Magazine gave Yuja's recording of Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto a 'critics choice' award when it came out in 2013. If you want to believe 2nd rate reviewers you will never appreciate the great depth of this superb artist, or any other for that matter.

​@@mariodisarli1022 Your comments on every video of her clearly show that you're more obsessed with her than even most of her fans. How bizarre. Your mind must be a tormented, sad place. Even if she were a terrible pianist and a bad artist, she'd still be doing a million times more good for the world than you'll ever do spending so much time commenting on her videos quoting her negative press (as if reviews from random music critics carry any weight anyway! lol).

This was very mechanical. She's not bad but no Ashkenazy for instance

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.

Google translation: "Berlin Berliner Morgenpost Kultur Kirill Petrenko conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker 15.04.2018, 03:00 Uhr Felix Stephan Top-Events in Berlin "... And Petrenko's most recent Philharmonic program also fits into this It moves exclusively in the first half of the 20th century, and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 is clearly the main attraction of the evening, especially as the Chinese Yuja Wang reaches into the keys, a pianist, half Circus horse, half machine, with a lurid record tempi in the outer sets and mercilessly accurate chord attacks.Whoever had always suspected that the piano is a drum kit, will feel confirmed by Yuja Wang." ...

It's ok if you like her performance. No one likes every pianist in the world.

--- quot homines tot sententiae

Well if you compare her playing in the same octave by each hand within a few seconds of each other (such as starting at 1:22 ) then I think it's clear that the right hand volume is a choice in Wang's performance, not a recording imbalance. 🎹

Google translation: "Berlin Berliner Morgenpost Kultur Kirill Petrenko conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker 15.04.2018, 03:00 Uhr Felix Stephan Top-Events in Berlin "... And Petrenko's most recent Philharmonic program also fits into this It moves exclusively in the first half of the 20th century, and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 is clearly the main attraction of the evening, especially as the Chinese Yuja Wang reaches into the keys, a pianist, half Circus horse, half machine, with a lurid record tempi in the outer sets and mercilessly accurate chord attacks.Whoever had always suspected that the piano is a drum kit, will feel confirmed by Yuja Wang." ...

You think your prurient fascination in a woman playing a piano qaulifies you as a connoisseur of art??? Do you think that the greatest composers of our planet have composed the greatest works of music, so that mediocre pianists can entertain the audience sexually? Listen to Wagner, dear Mr. "Fan"! Wagner's flight of the walküren (der Ritt der Walküren von Richard Wagner). Here, in this video, the whole society about which you write: Yuya, Khatia, Lola, Alice, ... and you, and your mom, and your dad! Look, listen and enjoy !!! player.vimeo.com/video/57468088?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=d30000&api=1&player_id=media-player

Michael Clampett I think the Right Hand doesnt even have a melody most of the times

Lol the RH doesn't even have a melody as it's mostly just accompanimental figures; the LH is the hand with the melody

There are actually multiple melodies in the right hand... but yes the main melody is in the left hand

Today is 6.7.2023. Btw

Good luck with that. What competition?

Omg i got first place 100 points, i cant believe i acctually played this masterpiece😂​@emmanuelsebaali1767

Google translation: "Berlin Berliner Morgenpost Kultur Kirill Petrenko conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker 15.04.2018, 03:00 Uhr Felix Stephan Top-Events in Berlin "... And Petrenko's most recent Philharmonic program also fits into this It moves exclusively in the first half of the 20th century, and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 is clearly the main attraction of the evening, especially as the Chinese Yuja Wang reaches into the keys, a pianist, half Circus horse, half machine, with a lurid record tempi in the outer sets and mercilessly accurate chord attacks.Whoever had always suspected that the piano is a drum kit, will feel confirmed by Yuja Wang." ...

You think your prurient fascination in a woman playing a piano qaulifies you as a connoisseur of art??? Do you think that the greatest composers of our planet have composed the greatest works of music, so that mediocre pianists can entertain the audience sexually? Listen to Wagner, dear Mr. "Cortez"! Wagner's flight of the walküren (der Ritt der Walküren von Richard Wagner). Here, in this video, the whole society about which you write: Yuya, Khatia, Lola, Alice, ... and you, and your mom, and your dad! Look, listen and enjoy !!! player.vimeo.com/video/57468088?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=d30000&api=1&player_id=media-player

@@mariodisarli1022 Buy some Omo and wash your mind. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GNcSA2XP-yo.html

@@redviolin25 What the hell is that? I love that!

@@segmentsAndCurves It's an ad from Fleggaard supermarket

Рахманинов никогда не был против исполнительских трактовок нотного текста

@@aapshh под исполнительской трактовкой понимаем что? искажение авторского текста? найдите мне хоть одну запись Рахманинова пианиста где он играет чуждый темп (и это даже не ввязываясь в дискуссию о том что положено Юпитеру)

@@vaxx2007 Ну если уж на то пошло, то можно включить любую Рахманиновскую запись его же фортепианных концертов)

@@vaxx2007 Фрагмент из эссе Сергея Сергеевича из книги «Мысли и афоризмы о фортепианном искусстве» «Конечно, для успеха исполнителю необходима яркая индивидуальность, и каждая его интерпретация должна быть окрашена ею. Но в то же время, следует постоянно искать разнообразия.» Также достаточно осознать одну истину: музыканты 21 века, имеющие совершенно иной диапазон образно-слухового опыта, представляют слушателю новый художественный результат, нежели исполнители 20 века. Судить о том, плохо это или хорошо, я не буду, ибо мне больше нравится слушать музыку, а не заниматься критиканством)

@vaxx2007 --- Sameness? --- check out Hofmann's mindblowing "Waldstein"

What experience qualifications have you to judge ? Couch Potato Extraordinaire ?

@@geofffreeburn868 it is just my opinion, i have been studying piano for several years and really know this etude pretty well, so definitely the version by Richter or Lugansky are quite far somewhere else, it is not just good to have superb technique as Yuja, you must also understand the structure and voicing that I miss sometimes in her interpretation,

Very difficult to bring out that right hand melody without obstructing the left hand melody with the rest of the triplet accompaniment… Ashkenazy does it very well in my opinion

Comfortable octave = big enough.

this was recorded at Berlin Philharmonie!

@@deutschegrammophon So? Don't you know how to place mikes and make a proper balance?

@@thepianocornertpc it might correlate with your microphone output.. the audio quality is as if i was listening it live for me.

@@mariodisarli1022 I have no idea what you say, I do not understand german 🙄

Yes and the playing is boring. Trolls unite! So we may push you all off a high cliff!

@@99Grigor THE NEW YORKER by Janet Malcolm " What is one to think of the clothes the twenty-nine-year-old pianist Yuja Wang wears when she performs-extremely short and tight dresses that ride up as she plays, so that she has to tug at them when she has a free hand, or clinging backless gowns that give an impression of near-nakedness (accompanied in all cases by four-inch-high stiletto heels)? 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.” Two years later, the New Criterion critic Jay Nordlinger characterized the “shorter-than-short red dress, barely covering her rear,” that Yuja wore for a Carnegie Hall recital as “stripper-wear.” Never has the relationship between what we see at a concert and what we hear come under such perplexing scrutiny. Is the seeing part a distraction (Glenn Gould thought it was) or is it-can it be-a heightening of the musical experience? During the intermission of a recital at Carnegie Hall in May, Yuja changed from the relatively conventional long gold sequinned gown she had worn for the first half, two Brahms Ballades and Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” into something more characteristically outré. For the second half, Beethoven’s extremely long and difficult Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat, known as the “Hammerklavier,” she wore a dress that was neither short nor long but both: a dark-blue-green number, also sequinned, with a long train on one side-the side not facing the audience-and nothing on the other, so that her right thigh and leg were completely exposed. As she performed, the thigh, splayed by the weight of the torso and the action of the toe working the pedal, looked startlingly large, almost fat, though Yuja is a very slender woman. Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven! ..."

I'd like to know what a difficult piece is then... Even the opening figurations in the RH are very uninviting. From my perspective, this would easily be one of the most difficult technically in the Études-Tableaux.

@@flyingpenandpaper6119 Well, it's not for beginners! LOL But its patterns are easily discernible. .The best advice I got was maintaining "looseness" for the right hand in order to move from the fifth finger to the thumb or 2nd finger "fluidly". Its distinct sections make learning "easier". This pairs well with No 2 (A Minor). I also like Nos 1, 3 and 7 from Opus 33 (the "easy" ones) I also like the Preludes, some every bit as hard as the Etudes (Gave up on D Flat Maj , E Flat Min and the horrific D Min)

@@smb123211 Hmm... Perhaps. Maybe I will have another stab at trying the opening-it was a couple of years ago when I tried it last. But I know that my technique is not yet good enough to learn the full piece. We seem to like similar Études-Tableaux, although my favourites are Op. 33 No. 4, the only one I have learnt, and Op. 39 No. 8-the more Impressionistic ones. I already knew which Preludes you were talking about when you mentioned difficulty LOL. Although I like most of them, for me, who is quite lazy, many aren't compelling enough to learn. I'd only like to learn Am, Bb, Bbm, Cm, Em (maybe one day!), F#m. For now, I know the G#m and the classic C#m. Oh, and I'd like to learn his Sonata 2, but it might be a few years before I even think about that one :(

@@flyingpenandpaper6119 I wrote in fingering where needed and this really reinforced it. The best (by far) recording of the 2nd Sonata is Van Cliburn's live Moscow set. Beyond incredible (it was the original / hard version). As I said I heard him live - Etude Op 39 No 5 - again incredible phrasing & inner melodies Preludes - I love C Maj, C Min, B Flat m, D Maj, E flat M, D Min, F Maj, A Min, B Maj, G sharp m, G flat M, etc. (Notice the ones left out - lol) Good Luck

@@smb123211 Which ones did you leave out? I didn't get it. Lucky, getting to see Van Cliburn. I've only heard one live performance myself, of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and I didn't realise how much the effect of hearing it live transcends just listening through headphones. It practically enabled my enjoyment of the piece.

А что вам не понравилось ? Это конечно не бесподобное исполнение Луганского, но тоже очень хорошо

Ou c'est que la musique peut transcender la nationalité

They are around; you view the past with rose colored glasses...

@@bloodgrss a few around but nobody better than Marc Andre Hamelin. People only dream of playing his repertoire

@@ciararespect4296 But what is the definition of 'better'? Music should not be a competitive sport, unless it is a foolish piano competition. There is much the marvelous Hamlin plays that I would go to other pianists to hear 'better'; as, so far, I would go to him for Alkan, C.P.E. Bach (along with Pletnev) and some others. The performance of any pianist should and can be pleasing if it is an honor to the music; no need for some of us to rush home to find what might be, in our subjective opinions, the 'best'. In her wide repertoire, Yuja has many hits too...

@@bloodgrss agree but can't see the raving about yuja. Her Mozart is bland. And I'm. Not keen on her scriabin. It's purely her dress that keeps her popular I go to hamelin for alkan volodos for Schubert. Sokolov for baroque generally. Szidon for scriabin. Richter for most things. Liszt I go to cziffra etc

@@ciararespect4296 What little Mozart she has done, most prominently his 9th concerto, is superb. As is, by any objective standard, her Scriabin. The dress throws you obviously, but many fans and non-fans have no difficulty looking past that with their ears to hear a fine artist with amazing skill. Your go to's are ,again, a personnel choice; most of them ARE great. But not necessarily definitive, except for you. Yet, to denigrate Yuja Wang because of them, and her dress, has more than a whiff of shallow sexism that informs any valid critical ear you have toward her...

Gregg Michalak well, I don’t know if having Donald Trump as the American president is worse, or having a music taste like you.

@@selfissimo Then why even waste your time commenting?? I'm simply not bowled over by pianists whose playing sounds contrived, easy or "out-of-pocket". It is bemusing how easily people are wowed by such playing. I truly believe today's audiences have basically lost sight of where pianism was at the turn of the century when giants like Rachmaninoff, Moisievitsch, Friedman, Hoffman, Lipatti, Kapell, Godowsky, Gieseking, Gilels, Richter....the list goes on....walk the planet. Look at what it has come to-pretty women wearing cocktail dresses acting and playing as if their role in music-making is more important than the music. Yuja is not the worse offender here, Astanov has her beat by a country mile, but you get the idea. Yuja talks nice on TV interviews but really is a stuck up snob who has little consideration for her fellow musicians, audiences OR her page turners. Her on stage demeanor resembles some sort of fembot programmed to walk out, bow in a totally mecanical manner and sit down and play the most gorgeous music in the most flashy and mundane way. There is "showmanship" and then there's "show-me-ship" which many many pianists adhere to these days because idolatry has become more than the music itself. Her tone is also meh-she has no clue how to produce a beautifully burnished tone such as Gilels or Lipatti. When I see a musician of THAT stature then I take notice. This ain't that.

@@selfissimo You should google his (Gregg Michalak) own playing for a good laugh...

@@Heather-im5sg , well, he may not be as good as Yuja Wang but unless you show your videos, he is better than you. And I agree with him, Yuja Wang is a great talent, with immense technical abilities, but musically she has nothing special, rather mediocre.

@@selfissimo You didn't really address his criticism, and it wasn't even all criticism.

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 You again? Can someone just pay him to go away already, of course more than whoever paid him to troll in comment section of EVERY freaking single Yuja Wang videos??

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.