Two important points to make today: 20-year old pianist Yuja Wang made an exuberant, triumphant Chicago Symphony debut last night in Prokofiev's fiendish Second Piano Concerto with Charles Dutoit, a champion of hers, conducting. (Not that it proves anything, but Dutoit was in the audience for her Orchestra Hall recital last season when she subbed for Murray Perahia.) She's got the chops to play the scherzo's super-intricate passages, she's got the smarts to make honest-to-God music out of the first movement's long cadenza, which leads to some of the most heaving, punishing music Prokofiev wrote, and she has the stamina to hold up under the strain of a piece with virtually no breaks for 30 minutes. Her tightly coiled passion put me in mind of Martha Argerich during that cadenza, and, mark my words, we'll be hearing much, much more from this sprite in a green, strapless dress.
The other is Alex Ross' mention of Hans-Joachim Hespos. I think I can claim to be the only North American journalist to have interviewed Hespos. He was in Bloomington in 2001 for the premiere of his orchestral work OIX: Symphonic Gestures for Large Orchestra, and I figured I should write an advance of this concert for the Bloomington Independent. (BI is defunct and not online; if I can find the tear sheet I'll scan it and post it here.)
I went to conductor Thomas Baldner's house for the interview, which was conducted with Baldner running interference/translating. The closest I could come to ferreting out the method to Hespos' madness—why he insisted that each member of the orchestra play from a full score, which was notated in the manner of late Stravinsky; why he wrote a work in which a percussionist had to cut himself out of a cage with a blow-torch—was that it was done on a whim. OIX wasn't some negative Roman numeral, it had no meaning, and was pronounced oicks. Baldner tried to make a connection to the Brandenburg concertos, too, I think. He was a strange bird.
The work itself I remember as being a harrowing commentary on the banality of daily life as currently lived by so many people, with many severely pointillistic gestures. Ja? Still, you can't help but admire a composer whose official bio includes the line "This stringent reliance on individual responsibility and commitment is extended by [H]espos even to orchestral scores, the results from which have often been unsatisfying."
Photo: Christian Steiner
