Robert Battey, The Washington Post
Leonidas Kavakos, a frequent visitor to the District of Columbia, is the luckiest violinist in the world. For several years now, he has enjoyed a regular collaboration with superstar pianist Yuja Wang. It is unusual for a solo artist of Wang’s stature to develop an ongoing duo with an instrumentalist. The only parallel would be Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, but they have been friends since college.
Normally, Mutter or Hahn or Bell appears here with excellent accompanists, but the spotlight is always on the headliner. Tuesday at Strathmore, in a presentation of Washington Performing Arts, the script was flipped: Kavakos is of course a top-tier fiddler, but Wang is arguably the hottest pianist in the world right now.
The program was well chosen: sonatas by Bartok, Debussy and Janacek, plus the Olympian Schubert Fantasia (their encore was an arrangement of Schubert’s “Sei mir gegrüsst!”). The sonatas were temporally close but spanned a huge range of styles and textures. Especially in the Bartok and Janacek, the two instruments are like ships of different size sailing side-by-side, going in the same general direction but sharing neither passengers nor cargo. This allowed the artists to fully express their outsize personalities.
It was clear from the start that these two were unusually attuned to one another; this came, paradoxically, from their aloofness. Kavakos often played with his back to Wang, who rarely glanced at him anyway. Despite the absence of eye contact, the ensemble was well-nigh perfect, even in the treacherous Schubert …
Wang’s bionic fingers continue to astonish. The beginning of the Schubert, with its impossible double-tremolos, seems to open a window to eternity. I say “seems” because I’ve never heard any pianist render each note evenly, creating the whispering, crepuscular sound that Schubert imagined, without any false accents.
But like everything else she does, Wang made it seem easy. All night long, she ranged up and down the keyboard like a lioness, capturing musical prey at will.