Samuel Barber: Piano Concerto, Opus 38
Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Opus 16
Conductor: Eric Jacobsen
Piano and conductor: Yuja Wang
Superstar pianist Yuja Wang is one of those musicians that I simply cannot miss whenever they come around my neck of the woods, so I was understandably thrilled when I noticed that she would be joining the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone last week, while I was still living a few-minute walk from it. And although I did not even particularly care what she would be playing, I was ecstatically happy to find out that it would be a composition by Prokofiev and eagerly planned to resuming my early Saturday evening residency with the orchestra.
And then last week, on the appointed day and time, an unknown gentleman came onto the stage with a mike, which rarely spells good news. And sure enough, he started by telling us that Wang had woken up with a 39-degree fever that morning, which prompted a collective murmur of concern throughout the concert hall, although it was not entirely clear if the audience was more worried about her compromised well-being or her possible absence from the stage. However, before we got to dwell on it, he went on and said that Wang, being the ultimate professional in addition to a genuinely generous person, would be playing after all, and he just wanted to thank her publicly. Whew!
He also let us know that the order of the program, which had already been changed a few weeks earlier due to the original conductor’s illness and now included a work by Barber, had been shuffled so that she would have more time to prepare, which was fair enough with us as long as we got to hear our girl.
So our concert started with La Mer by Claude Debussy, who called it “three symphonic sketches” and adamantly refused to describe it as “impressionistic”, a term that he whole-heartedly scorned, but pretty much everybody else agreed on. In any case, the work is a wonderful evocation of the ever-changing nature of the sea by a composer who was deeply in love with it, never mind that he was getting his inspiration mostly from paintings. On Saturday night, the large orchestra delivered a particularly soulful, delicately contrasting interpretation under the precise baton of Eric Jacobsen, a face I recognized from The Knights and Brooklyn Riders back in New York City. Ah, memories…
But let’s face it, we were all there to see and hear Yuja Wang, and the packed audience went bonkers when she finally appeared, her petite silhouette complete with her signature impeccable bob cut, tight-fitting white mini-dress and vertiginously high Louboutin shoes. She did not let the rock star welcome get to her head though, and while she may have slightly teetered on her way to the piano (Who would not on those heels?), there was no question that she was in complete possession of herself once she had gotten situated in front of the keyboard and down to business.
I had never heard Samuel Barber’s reputedly thorny Piano Concerto, Op. 38 before, and I obviously could not have dreamed of better company for my first encounter with it. The heroic duel between the fearless solo piano and the powerful large orchestra was a loud, occasionally uneasy, affair, but warmth and lyricism were never far beneath the rough surface. And there was of course plenty of acrobatic virtuosity flying from pianist’s hands, on which I happened to have a direct view. Feverish or not, the irrepressible miss Wang was hot, hot, hot!
After intermission, Wang came back wearing a tight-fitting red dress as well as the double hat of soloist and conductor since Jacobsen, who had gamely filled in for the ailing Teodor Currentzis until then, was not familiar with the piece, but she serendipitously was. That said, aside from the all-important downbeat and a few fleeting moments, she never got around to conducting that much anyway as she kept incredibly busy dealing with Sergei Prokofiev’s formidable Piano Concerto No. 2, so formidable, in fact, that even Martha Argerich would not dare to give it a try.
But then again, there are probably very few things that Wang and her well-known penchant for making the impossible possible would not dare to give a try to, and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is not one of them, which was very fortunate for us. The technically brilliant performance was also an absolute blast, proving one more time that bold modernity and unabashed fun are not mutually exclusive. In Wang’s magical hands, the music came out exceptionally bold and playful, grotesque and romantic, exacting and colorful. And the ovation was thunderous. Again.
After such an intensely satisfying evening, we would have all been happy to call it a night. But the unstoppable dynamo who once treated the stunned audience to seven encores at Carnegie Hall had another plan for us, poor health be damned. She eventually came back for three encores, including a devilishly irresistible precipitato from Prokofiev’s Sonata n. 7. In the end, as we were all walking down the stairs on our way out, I could overhear a woman behind me raving non-stop to her friend about Wang’s “bravura” and “virtuosità”, and I could not have agreed more.
