On August 25, Yuja Wang joins the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and conducting legend Zubin Mehta at the Riga Jurmala Music Festival. Yuja will perform Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, known as one of the most challenging piano concertos, requiring perfect technique and musicality. The program also features Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a program symphony that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination, who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless, unrequited love.
The performance will be broadcasted live via Medici.tv on Sunday, August 25, 2019, at 2:00 PM (EDT). Ms. Wang recorded Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and Gustavo Dudamel in 2013, released by Deutsche Grammophon. For more information and purchase links, visit Yuja’s Recordings.
“Yuja Wang’s scales are not just fast; they are blindingly fast. Her finger work is not just proficient; it is superhuman. She sailed through octave and chordal passages that would stymie many great pianists with much bigger hands, always on, or on the front-end of the beat. Vladimir Horowitz himself is said to have off-handedly declared that the secret to virtuosity is “to play more notes in a shorter amount of time”. By this measure, Wang succeeded most admirably and is, in every sense a virtuoso.” (Bachtrack)
© Julia Wesely