Queensland Symphony Orchestra Studio, South Bank
Sunday May 12, 2024
Joyce Yang
Yang is celebrating her return to Australia with an all-Russian program, concluding with Mussorgsky’s epic Pictures at an Exhibition: a delight for pianists of all abilities who can find in its pages some highly graphic (or pictorial) descriptions, and enough variety to please even those of us with imperfect equipment – through laziness or age (or both). She began what I think was her first Brisbane appearance (ever?) with parts of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, continued with two well-known Rachmaninov Preludes (although not the too-familiar C sharp minor or the G minor) and a rarity in the D Major piece from the Op. 23 collection of ten. As well, we heard three parts of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet in an arrangement by Guido Agosti who never got around to working at the first two parts of the composer-extracted 1919 suite.
Some of us would be aware of the Tchaikovsky 12-part collation for its arrangement by Edward Grigoryan for his guitarist sons Slava and Leonard; not so much for the work in its original piano form, even if my generation of young Australian players would have come across the November piece known as Troika which was once part of the AMEB syllabus for I-can’t-remember-which level. Yang chose half of the available months: By the Fireside for January, Carnival for February, Snowdrop for April, May Nights, Barcarolle for June, and Harvest for August.
Yang opened with an excellent January, the piece highly amiable in its own right and here distinguished by the executant’s carrying top line, carefully shaped and clear. Tchaikovsky’s festive February wasn’t so much, although its central stanzas came across more successfully than their bookends. Whatever Tchaikovsky thought about snowdrop flowers or the meteorological event (both mentioned in the piece’s accompanying poem), his invitation to consider both here has little melodic or harmonic interest, the only eyebrow-raising passage arriving when the main (only?) theme transfers to the alto line. The composer’s bifocal May Nights moves between a 9/8 barcarolle and a sprightly 2/4 dance, the latter winning out in the colourful stakes as briskly accounted for by Yang.
Probably the only one of the twelve pieces in the suite that enjoys popular currency, June’s Barcarolle is distinguished by its splendid main melody which glides with just as typical a breadth and melancholy as many of the belted-to-death ballet tunes. Yang’s interpretation found a cogent balance between sentiment and linear strength, notably in the central Poco piu mosso and Allegro giocoso romps. Her rapid path through harvest-time emphasized the inbuilt syncopations in the 6/8 (and occasionally implied 3/4) tempo and the piece’s mildly virtuosic moments served to demonstrate this executant’s rapid recovery rate.
In the first of the Op. 32 Rachmaninov excerpts, the slow B minor gem of musical depression, the main memory I have is of Yang’s powerful left hand across the prelude’s middle section which operates over a sequence of massive octave semibreve pedals, here generated with impressively full-blooded commitment. As well, this pianist exercised a noticeably free rubato in working through the initial and closing pages – which added much to the inbuilt emotional mournfulness. With her view of the G sharp minor No 12, Yang gave a prominence that I found unusual to the opening sextuplet ripples in the right hand which threatened to overpower the piece’s first theme, until this latter acquired some supporting chords. Despite this unsettling mode of attack, the pages were treated with a welcome fluidity and dynamic contrast that was sustained to the elusive final four bars.
Still, I thought the version offered of the Op. 23 D Major Prelude showed us the afternoon’s most complete Rachmaninov with a seamlessness to Yang’s principal melody announcement, which only improved in empathy on its second statement underneath those pear-like soprano triplets. Mind you, I might have been affected by the soothing warmth of this piece after a double-dose of spiralling gloom from its precedents. Still its gentle contours enjoyed sensitive treatment from this gifted artist who opted for linear integrity over sentimentality.
Stravinsky made his own piano score of the complete Firebird ballet in 1910, the same year as the work’s Paris premiere with the Ballets Russes. Agosti’s transcription offers much more scope for the gifted pianist, even if the work’s contours become obscure under the flurries of notes incorporated for dramatic effect. I’m not talking about the Lullaby or Finale which enjoyed spacious accounts from Yang, embellished with glissandi, an attractively even chain of trills in the former piece, and a sermon of thunderously powerful chords over the final Doppio valore 14 bars.
The piling-up of material tended to get in the way of the Infernal Dance‘s hurtling progress. Nothing wrong with the opening bass tattoo, but matters got more complicated about Number 136 in the original piano transcription, and continued to sound more cluttered from Number 146 onwards, up to the arrival of that melting moment at the change of key signature to D flat Major when melody rules all.. Nonetheless, despite a liberal use of glissandi, Agosti manages to generate more excitement with his realization of this dance’s final strophes than Stravinsky’s own rather ordinary realization.
The three segments made a fine vehicle for Yang’s musicianship and – wonder of wonders – the original shone through nearly continuously throughout. Commentators have noted the popularity of this transcription but I must confess to hearing it here live for the first time – after years of exposure to the three Petrushka movements that the composer put together for Rubinstein. Many thanks, then, to Yang for this unusual piece of programming.
So, we came to the big Mussorgsky collection. We immediately encountered a sure-footed promenader, quite at ease in the gallery surrounds: a gallery-wise, confident flaneur. Gnomus burst upon us with maximum rapidity and an admirably lucid realization of that final six bars velocissimo rush. More chastened promenading before a rather hard-edged The Old Castle, featuring a most insistent G sharp ostinato. Yes, it does continue pretty much across the whole piece but it seemed to dominate these proceedings like a threat.
The two-page Tuileries enjoyed deft treatment, if singular for a number of unprescribed pauses in the dispute. Not much novel in the Bydlo interpretation besides Yang’s persistent left hand ostinato pounding out below the driving principal theme. We enjoyed a clear account of the Unhatched Chicks with its alternations of acccciature and trills, here carried out with excellent regularity of attack and delivery..
Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle appeared in vivid form, the latter much more aggressive in the final 11 bars where the plutocrat has less dominance than he usually enjoys. For once, this sample of musical racism gave rise to a drama, rather than an unappealing portrait of bullying. After a final, athletic statement of the Promenade, Yang produced a hectic vision of the Limoges Market where the activity proved non-stop – no pause in this commercial outlet for any dawdling, finished off with a powerful four-bar rush of demi-semiquavers that came up against the full-stop of Hartmann’s Catacombs, here announced with very sustained chords, the fermate stretched to their limits.
A ghostly reshaping of the Promenade inspired the Con mortuis in lingua mortua page, the right-hand tremolo sustained with fine balance across this spectral page that impresses me a good deal more than many other parts in this composition. Baba-Jaga loped past with a hefty curmudgeonliness that very few pianists can avoid. Nonetheless, you could find plenty of time to admire Yang’s clarion-clear double-octave work in the outer pages of this picture before reaching the apogee of The Great Gate of Kiev.
Here, once more, you were aware of the power in Yang’s left hand at the principal theme’s restatement from bar 9 on. Even towards the crushing conclusion when Mussorgsky moves into triplet minims across the 2/2 bars, this pianist still found plenty of shoulder power to keep you involved with the piece’s theatrics to the final allargando 13-bar weltering into what is by now a voluptuous bath in E flat Major. A short encore or Grieg’s Notturno helped ease the tension as a salute to Mothers’ Day, but what I carried away at the recital’s end was a thorough admiration of Yang’s skill and controlled virtuosity, evident across every stage of her individualistic Mussorgsky reading.