The New York Times: The preternaturally gifted Ms. Wang — showily attired as usual, in a gown with a plunging neckline — joined the orchestra in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, playing with energy and flair in the outer movements and limpid grace in the central Adagio. But that was almost the least of it.
Ms. Wang is one of many performers who like to flesh out their musical personalities with copious encores. Here she opened with the frenetic finale of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, played at breakneck speed.
She concluded with a couple of her well-traveled gems, beginning with Mozart’s little “Turkish March,” as arranged by Volodos and Fazil Say: virtuosic in the extreme. Then, utterly disarmingly, she added Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s simple, churning song “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”).
Marvels of technical display no longer come as a surprise from Ms. Wang. But what truly amazed here was her touch at the start, as plush and lovely as I have ever heard from a pianist.
Image: Richard Termine