“Thursday, with Yuja Wang as Dudamel’s spectacular soloist in “Rhapsody in Blue” at the Hollywood Bowl, everything changed big time. This was a Gershwin performance for the Bowl history books, which have chapters devoted to all the composer’s greatest interpreters …
Ravel nailed a jazzy French style with his Concerto in G. It is a Wang specialty. Wearing one of her trademark colorful gowns, she offered a spectacularly sparkling performance, full of snap. She made of the slow movement an elegant blues. Dudamel was attentive to her every whim …
With an enormous orchestra filling the Bowl stage, Dudamel found an ideal balance between two worlds. He also had in Wang a pianist able to merge those worlds with an astonishing brilliance. I can’t say I saw it coming that the Chinese pianist would be so persuasive a Gershwin player. It may help that she’s had mentoring from Tilson Thomas. But this is also one of those composer-performer relationships that simply click.
She dressed the part, changing into a glittery blue short skirt and perilously high spiked heels, seemingly an ergonomic disaster for pedaling that she somehow overcame. But for all the attention Wang attracts, she is a cool customer. Maybe that is her Gershwin secret, along with her unerring technique and musicality.
She played long solo jazz passages with the kind of nonchalance that Gershwin displayed at the keyboard. She flirted with the keys in lyrical passages. The video cameras got carried away with tight facial shots, showing her sly satisfaction with nailing virtuosic passages rather than her fabulous finger work …
Wang and Dudamel together quarried every over-familiar, over-mined inch of “Rhapsody in Blue” for something startling fresh …
With Wang as just the Gershwin guide Dudamel has always needed, he remained thrillingly responsive to her while magnifying and intensifying her explosive implications.”
Mark Swed – Los Angeles Times