Yuja Wang, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Carnegie Hall following their traversal of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.
“After playing, with electric mastery, all four of Rachmaninoff’s dizzyingly difficult piano concertos and his ‘Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini’ on Saturday — the kind of feat for which the phrase ‘once in a lifetime’ was invented — Yuja Wang would have been forgiven for accepting a sold-out Carnegie Hall’s standing ovation,” writes Zachary Woolfe in Sunday’s (1/29) New York Times. “But … on Saturday, the audience hushed as Wang, after all she’d already done with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sat back down at the piano and played the ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ from Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Euridice.’ It had the same freshness and tender lucidity that, in her hands, had lain beneath even Rachmaninoff’s densest, most ferocious fireworks…. To these scores’ vast demands she brought both clarity and poetry. She played with heft but not bombast, sentiment but not schmaltz…. Not a single note was harsh or overly heavy … [Wang played] with power and accuracy … and patience and elegance … The Philadelphians were practically feline in the iridescent orchestration of the grim Dies Irae’s appearance in the ‘Rhapsody.’…Virtuosity on this level, in material this ravishing, is elevating to witness.”
