Music review: Joyce Yang makes her Bowl debut

Thursday was a sultry night at the Hollywood Bowl, with a fiery moon an apt lead-in to an old-fashioned Romantic program in which guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” and Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” and Piano Concerto No. 2.

 The soloist in the concerto was Joyce Yang in her Bowl debut. Born in Seoul, she won the silver medal at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, at 19. Since then, she’s been establishing herself in the Russian repertory. Past notices for her Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev concertos have praised her supple phrasing, fine articulation, poise and intelligence.

But on this occasion her performance felt forced. From the opening chords, suggesting tolling bells, Yang pushed and pulled phrases, only sometimes to interesting effect. While she demonstrated the kind of presence and charm that delights competition judges and audiences, she rarely conveyed the power this robust and hugely difficult score demands.

This was not an equal partnership, with Harth-Bedoya reluctant to challenge Yang’s determined account. Balances were a problem. In the first movement, her arpeggios got lost amid the violins, violas and clarinets — a reminder of how much time the piano spends accompanying the orchestra.

Yang can play with delicacy, though she tended to skim over the keys. She can handle breakneck speed. But her overly bright, thin tone created what the late Times critic Daniel Cariaga once called “a sameness of aural textures.” Perhaps that quality was exaggerated by the Bowl’s amplification system.
The good news is that she is continuing her studies at the Juilliard School, which suggests she’s a serious musician who may yet emerge in the front rank.

After Yang’s exciting dash to the finish, a Bowl crowd of 9,641 treated her to a standing ovation. Her encore: Schumann’s Intermezzo from “Carnival of Vienna.”

After intermission, Harth-Bedoya displayed his command of musical narrative in “Scheherazade.” It’s a wildly colorful score, and the orchestra played it with tender, surging passion. The work can feel long in the wrong hands, but the conductor proved natural and winning, paying just the right amount of attention to inner detail without cluttering the larger fabric.

Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour turned his sweet-toned and nimble violin into a beguiling narrator, a Sultan’s wife who saves herself by telling stories to her husband over 1,001 nights.
The concert opener, an orchestral setting of Rachmaninoff’s wordless “Vocalise,” set a soulful, melancholy mood.

--Rick Schultz

Comments

[Webmaster -- Fullerton Friends of Music]

My account of the concert differs from Mr. Schultz.
Having heard Joyce Yang performance of this concerto with Eri Klas and the Estonian SO at Cerritos, I feel her account at the Bowl was a stronger, more dynamic account (I did benefit from the fact that my seat was close enough to the stage that the amplification system had minimal influence on the sonics).

Compared to other more traditional Rachmaninov Concerto performances, her playing is somewht delicate and nuanced, which promotes the exposure of the sirenity and beauty in Rachmaninov's music (a programming point that Maestro Harth-Bedoya brought forward in the concert opening introduction). Too often Rachmaninov Concerto performances become victims of bombastic and indulgent pianism.

Ms. Yang's style frames the notes and allows one to relish the sublime beauty and clear detail of some of Rachmaninov's musical phrasing.

Definitely not your thundering "Power Chords" version of Rachmaninov; but rather a welcome and non indulgent contrast to that style for this listener. I would term it a more classically-oriented approach to a work rooted in Romanticism but containing some great Classical stylistic elements.

What Mr. Schultz termed as skimming seemed more a case of fluidity in my view, which added to the energy and pace of the performance.

Equally rewarding was Martin Chalifour's solo contributions to "Schererazade", which I concur that the playing was nimble, yet refined.

The color of instrumentation that Rimsky-Korsakov brings to this work makes it a great introductory piece for any new concertgoer.

Both works were performed with good balance between the solo passages and orchestral accompaniment.

Kudos to Mr. Schultz for identifying Joyce Yang's piano encore work of the Schumann; it was difficult to hear all of Ms. Yang's announcement of the encore work from the piano bench. A detail that is part of a good concert review.