YUJA WANG - The Vienna Recital : Albéniz · Beethoven · Каpustin · Ligeti · Scriabin (2024) FLAC (image+.cue) lossless

No longer the young sensation, pianist Yuja Wang these days gets Deutsche Grammophon's "The [fill-in-the-city-name] Recital" treatment with several live concert recordings presented as major events, and, indeed, they are. This one was made in Vienna in April of 2022, and it is a remarkable high-wire act in its programming and execution, one that few pianists of the present or past could have duplicated. The usually staid Viennese press reported that the crowd on hand "went wild." One would never know that; Deutsche Grammophon's engineers have stripped out every trace of audience noise, and one wishes for traces of the excitement hearers must have felt as Wang swings from Albéniz to Scriabin to the Russian jazz of Nikolai Kapustin to Beethoven. All that is just in the first half of the show. One can try without success to figure out exactly what makes all this music hang together in Wang's hands; she is certainly one of the few pianists who could successfully follow etudes of Ligeti with one of Glass. The secret seems to lie in the detail she brings to each work. Consider her quick reading of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 18 in E flat major, Op. 31, No. 3 ("The Hunt"), in which she turns the opening gesture, usually gentle, into the call of a hunting horn at the beginning of an active outdoor happening. It is the same throughout, and the music works because it is all done sensitively, and it coheres into what the booklet calls "a musical gallery." An impressive outing from Wang, who continues to live up to and even exceed the high expectations she has generated for herself through publicity. Completely unsurprisingly, this release made classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2024. James Manheim    Tracklist & Credits :