Amongst the current crop of Chinese pianists on the international concert circuit, there is only one which fascinates me. It's a pianist who has got music in her soul, perhaps in her blood. She immerses herself into whatever music she plays. She breathes music. She lives music. And she enjoys playing music although it may sometimes frighten her to go on stage. But once on stage, something magical happens. It's as if she has finally found herself again. Somehow, all her fingers would instantly find the proper place to place themselves, with the right kind of force, the right kind of rhythm, the right kind of tonal quality, the right kind of texture, the right kind of inter-relations, the right kind of touch, the right kind of mood all by themselves. And perhaps for those very reasons, the music which surges from her fingers is imbued with her life and also the spirit of the composer into whose music she plunges herself, the result of long hours of pondering over it, digesting it, absorbing it, feeling it, imaginatively merging into it as if she were entering into the musical soul of the composer and thus infusing it with a new life, a new kind of vitality, a life in which it is no longer possible to tell which part of it belongs to the composer and which to her. She plays not merely intellectually, but emotionally, instinctually, almost viscerally. She gives the score something its doesn't have, life. She is my favourite Yuja Wang.
Last night, I had the chance to listen to her again, not as a soloist in a concerto, but a soloist simpliciter. She plays what comes most naturally to her, her kind of music: romantic music. She plays music by two of my favorite composers: Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) and Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), two musicians who write music fit only for heaven, each in their own way, the latter hugely influenced by the former. Indeed, Scriabin imagined himself a kind of messenger of God or even a species of god himself. Wang plays with enthusiasm, with passion, with power, with poesy and with with soul. Perhaps she finds an affinity with the fire, the passion, the yearnings, and the longings and the characteristic abandon of the Slavs, Chopin himself being a Pole whom some regard as part of the Slavic races, as is Scriabin, who is pure Russian. And she ends her official programme as she she begins it, with another Slav composer: the music of Balakiev.
