BY WENDY ZHANG
We would like to welcome Wendy in her first review as a CutCommon contributor.
Joyce Yang
Musica Viva tour
City Recital Centre, 14 July
If I could choose three words to describe Joyce Yang’s concert at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, they would be: exhilarating, atmospheric, and energetic.
This was one of the best solo piano concerts I’ve experienced: I gained a deeper understanding of each composer through Joyce’s music and words, and I was fully engaged for the entire performance.
Donning a beautiful blue gown, Joyce entered the stage to warm applause from an audience of mainly seniors and families with school-age children. Joyce performed Grieg’s Five Lyric Pieces as her opening work. I was immediately drawn to her performance – her intense facial expression and body movements were in sync with her music, which was a pleasure to watch. (I later discovered that Joyce learnt the Taubman approach when she undertook the Juilliard School pre-college program, which may explain why she used body movements a lot – particularly the arms – when playing.) Her music was atmospheric – the contrast between the simple Arietta and the dreamy and enchanting Nocturne was so effortlessly executed that had me transported to the world of Grieg, and temporarily lost in his Norwegian music.
After the interval, young Australian composer Elizabeth Younan stepped on stage and gave an introduction of her 2018 Piano Sonata, before welcoming Joyce to perform its world premiere. Despite the rhythmic difficulty, Joyce gave a powerful and energetic performance, portraying this contemporary Australian composition confidently through three movements.
Joyce then chatted to the audience about her final piece – Schumann’s Carnaval – and made a joke that she can finally use a break to relax her arms! Schumann and his contemporaries considered Carnaval so challenging that it was rarely performed in public during Schumann’s lifetime. Joyce explained that there was a lot of interruption during the piece, switching between different passages all the time; but she also encouraged us to embrace them and treat them as ‘escapes’ rather than interruptions.
When Joyce started playing, I understood immediately what she meant. There were times when she would play a fast passage and build up to the climax, then suddenly switch to a completely different slow movement, before abruptly returning to the original fast passage a few minutes later. Joyce seemed to embraced and even enjoy these interruptions, playing them as if escaping to a different time. I have tackled Schumann’s piano pieces in my own playing, and found them particularly challenging especially with these frequent changes. Having witnessed Joyce’s performance, I saw Schumann’s music in a different light; and made a promise to myself to go back to his pieces, and learn to enjoy and have fun with his interruptions.
Joyce finished the Carnval with a brilliant Marche des Davidsbundler (March of the League of David against the Philistines) – so passionate it sounded like fireworks exploding over the Sydney Harbour. The audience loved her playing and as such erupted into ongoing applause. She finally came back to the stage and gave an encore performance of Gershwin’s The Man I Love, ending the concert on a rather sweet note.
Images courtesy Musica Viva.
