(Pic: Chun Wang)Truly remarkable recital by 20 year-old pianist from China.
This week’s concert from the Friends of Music was a truly remarkable recital in the Durban Jewish Centre. Chun Wang is a 20-year-old pianist from China. He has won prizes in international competitions, has played with some big orchestras, and is at present a student at the Julliard School in New York.
Some “student”. For one so young he is a player of enormous skills, power and confidence. His keyboard technique is spectacular. And his insight into the music he is playing is acute. Listening to him, I wondered about the amount of study and practice that must have gone into his 20 years. But then he is from the east, where the work ethic among gifted people is something else. Whatever the background to his accomplishments, he delivered an evening of extraordinary pianism to the Friends of Music audience.
He opened a very taxing programme with Bach’s Toccata in D major, BWV 912, a work with which I am not familiar. This turned out to be an extended and brilliant piece. It was written about 300 years ago, and it is full of musical ideas that remain astonishingly modern today. The performance was excellent, with crisp, clear accents and well-judged phrasing.
Chun Wang followed with two big works by two supreme piano composers, Robert Schumann and Frederic Chopin, both born 200 years ago, in 1810. The choice of Schumann’s Phantasie in C, Op. 17, was particularly appropriate because this recital was given on June 8, 2010, two hundred years to the day from Schumann’s birth.
The fantasy is a beautiful three-movement work, a deeply felt personal utterance, and Chun Wang played it with perception and insight. It is difficult, especially the energetic second movement, and the technical problems were overcome with great dexterity.
Chopin’s Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, the one with the funeral mach, produced another virtuoso performance. The first movement was taken at high speed, too fast for my taste; there is some evidence that Chopin himself did not care for keyboard speed merchants. But there was some lovely cantabile playing in the slow section of the second movement and in the funeral march. And the ghost-like finale was performed with lightning-fast fingers.
Finally Chun Wang gave another extraordinary display of virtuoso playing in Stravinsky’s Trois mouvements de Petrouchka, the composer’s arrangement for piano of three movements from his celebrated ballet Petrushka, about a puppet who comes to life, with sad consequences.
This music was composed nearly a hundred years ago, for the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and it sounds as modern and innovative now as it must have done then. Chun Wang played it with extreme brilliance, executing very fast scales, rapid jumps, glissandos, complex rhythms, with great confidence and control. At the end a good-sized audience gave him a standing ovation.
The prelude performer of the evening, funded by the National Lottery, was Caterina Reigl, a 15-year-old recorder player who is a pupil at the Fatima Convent at Durban North. Accompanied by Bobby Mills at the piano, she played 18th century music by Georg Philipp Telemann and Giuseppe Sammatini (he had a brother named Giovanni but I think this piece was by Giuseppe) and 20th century music by the English composer Gordon Jacob. All very pleasant and well performed. - Michael Green
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