The Vienna Recital in Bloomington, MN

No longer the young sensation, pianist
Yuja Wang
these days gets
Deutsche Grammophon
's "The [fill-in-the-city-name] Recital" treatment with several live concert recordings presented as major events, and, indeed, they are. This one was made in Vienna in April of 2022, and it is a remarkable high-wire act in its programming and execution, one that few pianists of the present or past could have duplicated. The usually staid Viennese press reported that the crowd on hand "went wild." One would never know that;
's engineers have stripped out every trace of audience noise, and one wishes for traces of the excitement hearers must have felt as
Wang
swings from
Albéniz
to
Scriabin
to the Russian jazz of
Nikolai Kapustin
Beethoven
. All that is just in the first half of the show. One can try without success to figure out exactly what makes all this music hang together in
's hands; she is certainly one of the few pianists who could successfully follow etudes of
Ligeti
with one of
Glass
. The secret seems to lie in the detail she brings to each work. Consider her quick reading of
's
Piano Sonata No. 18 in E flat major, Op. 31, No. 3 ("The Hunt")
, in which she turns the opening gesture, usually gentle, into the call of a hunting horn at the beginning of an active outdoor happening. It is the same throughout, and the music works because it is all done sensitively, and it coheres into what the booklet calls "a musical gallery." An impressive outing from
, who continues to live up to and even exceed the high expectations she has generated for herself through publicity. Completely unsurprisingly, this release made classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2024. ~ James Manheim