{"id":13049,"date":"2013-06-12T22:41:26","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T03:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=13049"},"modified":"2013-06-12T22:41:26","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T03:41:26","slug":"concert-review-yuja-wang-a-pianistic-hummingbird-in-company-of-toronto-symphony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2013\/06\/12\/concert-review-yuja-wang-a-pianistic-hummingbird-in-company-of-toronto-symphony\/","title":{"rendered":"Concert review: Yuja Wang a pianistic hummingbird in company of Toronto Symphony"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Yuja<\/a>
Yuja Wang with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and music director Peter Oundjian at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday night (Dale Wilcox photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Toronto Symphony really is putting its best collective foot forward in its final serious concert programme of the 2012-13 season. It helps that its star guest this week is phenomenal 26-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang.<\/p>\n

There is a hummingbird-like quality to Wang’s playing: Her fingers move so quickly and work so very hard as she darts through whatever she performs with a clear sense of purpose and destination.<\/p>\n

For the first two of her three Toronto Symphony dates this week, she performs the fiendishly difficult Piano Concerto No.2<\/em> by Sergei Prokofiev. This big, bold work is marking its centenary this year alongside Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Just as Rite of Spring<\/em> created a fuss in Paris, the 22-year-old Prokofiev’s concerto did the same in St Petersburg. And both are now considered masterworks\u00a0 of the early 20th century.<\/p>\n

Both works require a certain grim determination leavened by sensuality. At Wednesday night’s concert, Wang chose surgical precision instead, yielding all the right notes, but not quite making some of the music’s potential deeply visceral connections.<\/p>\n

The orchestra, led by music director Peter Oundjian, was the ideally attentive partner and an equally impressive showcase of musical precision.<\/p>\n

The audience thanked the performers with a prolonged standing ovation and shouts of approval after the Prokofiev and the other Russian piece on the programme: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade<\/em> tone poem from 1888.<\/p>\n

Oundjian coaxed a vivid reading of this rich score out of his orchestra. It’s a piece that gives nearly every principal player in the ensemble a moment to shine — and everyone did beautifully, including concertmaster Jonathan Crow.<\/p>\n

Wednesday night’s audience also witnessed the premiere of Treeship<\/em>, the first piece by Torontonian Kevin Lau to be performed by the Toronto Symphony since he was named affiliate composer last summer.<\/p>\n

The new work, lasting slightly more than 10 minutes, showcases both the strings and the brass in an episodic voyage that sounded very much like a score in search of the right filmmaker.<\/p>\n

Treeship<\/em> has sweep and momentum. It also has a clear narrative arc bookended by wonderful orchestration that was the sonic embodiment of shimmering stars.<\/p>\n

It was good to see a good house on Wednesday night, because more people in the city need to experience exalted musicmaking like this.<\/p>\n

+++<\/p>\n

The Wednesday programme repeats on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Yuja Wang returns for Saturday’s late-night Toronto Symphony concert in honour of Luminato, which features the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1<\/em> alongside Scheherezade<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(Interesting that the TSO chose to go all-19th century Russian programme for a festival meant to showcase what’s new and exciting in the visual and performing arts.)<\/p>\n

You can find all the details on the Toronto Symphony’s concerts here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Terauds<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Toronto Symphony really is putting its best collective foot forward in its final serious concert programme of the 2012-13 season. It helps that its star guest this week is phenomenal 26-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,76,19,36,47,52,60,63],"tags":[6451,857,1817,6468,6471,3359,3642],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2013\/03\/wolf1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-3ot","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13049"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=13049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}