Joshua Kosman, SFGate
For a pianist, difficulty comes in many flavors, from the most obvious — tossing off fistfuls of notes with fiendish precision and dexterity — to more delicate tasks like making a persuasive case for a piece as weak as Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. In a glorious performance with the San Francisco Symphony on Wednesday, Nov. 2, Yuja Wang demonstrated that she can accomplish the latter as effortlessly as she does the rest of it.
Because she really can, you know, do anything. At this point I think I’d let her take out my appendix if it came to that …
The two concertos date from the very beginning of his career as a composer and performer, after which he turned his back on the not-so-glamorous life of the public virtuoso …
Yet there was Wang, in Davies Symphony Hall alongside Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, making this music count in ways that it rarely does. Suddenly the interactions between piano and orchestra sounded responsive and tight-knit, and even the gimcrack effusions of the finale seemed to shine in a new light.
Part of the secret was Wang’s gift for uncovering a vein of sublimity in even the most shopworn music. Because her finger skills are so terrifyingly fine, she can take for granted the technical challenges that other pianists have to labor over, and get past them to tackle difficult interpretive problems.
Those included the question of how to showcase the spidery keyboard filigree that peeks through the intermittent bombast of the first movement — a challenge she met with characteristic ease — and how to make the rambunctious runs and figurations of the last movement sound substantive. I have no idea how she pulled that last one off, and I was right there; it was like watching an expert stage magician at work.
Naturally, Wang fares best when given something meaty to work with. Her account of the slow movement — like her encore of Chopin’s Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 64, No. 2 — was a breathtaking display of soulful phrasing and subtle elegance.