Chun Wang (pictured) produces some of the best playing I have heard for a long time! (Review by Michael Green)
The 18-year-old Chinese pianist Chun Wang produced some of the best playing I have heard for a long time when he performed Chopin’s Concerto No. 1 in E minor with the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra in the Durban City Hall.
He had given a recital two days earlier for the Friends of Music, and I had some reservations about his presentation of Chopin’s twelve etudes of Op. 25. I felt that he was a bit heavy-handed in some of them and that they lacked tonal contrast.
No such criticism could be made of this concerto performance. Chun Wang was probably helped by the orchestra’s splendid Steinway piano and also by the sympathetic conducting of Leslie Dunner. And perhaps the music suited him better.
Whatever the reasons, this was a beautiful performance: crystal clarity in Chopin’s elaborate ornamentation, subtle but distinct gradations of tone, well-judged phrasing in the gentle slow movement, a lovely limpid quality in the lyrical themes, and forceful and accurate playing in the virtuoso passages.
In response to prolonged applause Chun Wang played a big and difficult encore, Liszt’s second Hungarian Rhapsody, possibly the most famous piano piece ever written. Like many other people, I have heard this piece hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, and I know the score, but I have never heard it played as fast as in Chun Wang’s version. They should have entered him for the Olympic Games in Beijing. He would have run away with the piano sprint prize. My recording of this rhapsody, by the Hungarian pianist Jeno Jando, runs to about 11 minutes. Jeno Jando is no slouch, but I think Chun Wang would have lopped about a minute off his time.
The audience was in raptures. Well, that’s what virtuoso piano playing is all about. And this from an 18-year-old!
The divine Mozart made up the rest of the programme, the Idomeneo overture and the Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, which, according to the programme, “is not much performed”, an assertion that I find hard to believe.
The playing was first-rate, as it usually is with Leslie Dunner in charge.- Michael Green
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