A Recital with A Difference: Yuja Wang’s The Vienna Recital

By Maureen Buja, Interlude

The idea of a recital – a single performer on their own stage, showing the best of themselves – is an old idea. Some Romantic performers, such as Liszt and Paganini, were best known through their recitals. The opportunity to showcase your art, unhampered by any other performer or ensemble, is unparalleled, but also fraught with danger: it’s pure exposure and you have to be up to the task.

Yuja Wang

In her recent recording The Vienna Recital, pianist Yuja Wang turns the original idea of a recital on its head. She does what you expect, with a bit of Beethoven to cover the Classical period, a bit of Brahms for the Romantic period, and a bit of Scriabin for the 20th century but then there’s music by Albéniz, Glass, Scriabin, and Kapustin for some jazz preludes. Delicacy of touch and contrast in styles seem to be the driving force for the assemblage of pieces here and there are some brilliant choices. The juxtaposition of Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2, one of the best-known modern Mexican orchestral pieces, here transcribed for solo piano, with one of Brahms’ Intermezzi, op. 117, seems to move Brahms into the same space where you were just dancing to Márquez’s music.

The selection of the music takes you over a range of centuries – from Gluck to the modern day – and presenting the works in a non-chronological order makes you rethink the details of the works, from harmony to rhythm.

It’s difficult to pick one track that shows how wonderful this album is, but we’ll go with one of the Ligeti Études. Number 13 from Book 2, The Devil’s Staircase, is a toccata of unending movement.

György Ligeti: Book 2, No. 13 – L’escalier du diable

Chinese pianist Yuja Wang (b. 1987) started her studies at age 7 at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing before entering the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at age 15. Even before her graduation in 2008, she had come to the world’s attention when she replaced Martha Argerich in a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2007. Her performing triumphs continued, today making her one of the leading pianists in the world.

If your idea of a recital is something to be endured with a few gems as a reward, then this recording will change your mind completely – it’s both constantly challenging to the pianist and constantly rewarding to the listener.

YuJa Wang: The Vienna Recital
Deutsche Grammophon 00028948645671

Official Website

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Regine Velasquez -Her Music and Her Life

 

Regina Encarnacion Ansong Velasquez (/rɪˈdʒiːn vɛˈlæskɛz/ rij-EEN vel-ASK-ez; born April 22, 1970) is a Filipino singer and actress. She is considered one of the most influential figures in Philippine popular culture and is known for her vocal range and belting technique. She had unorthodox voice training during her childhood, where she was immersed neck-deep in the sea. Velasquez rose to prominence after winning the television talent show Ang Bagong Kampeon in 1984 and the Asia Pacific Singing Contest in 1989. Under the name Chona, she signed a recording contract with OctoArts International in 1986 and released the single "Love Me Again", which was commercially unsuccessful. The following year, she adopted the stage name Regine Velasquez for her debut studio album, Regine (1987), under the guidance of Viva Records executive Vic del Rosario and producer Ronnie Henares. She explored Manila sound and kundiman genres on her second and third studio albums, Nineteen 90 (1990) and Tagala Talaga (1991).

After signing an international record deal with PolyGram Records, Velasquez achieved commercial success in some Asian territories with her fifth album Listen Without Prejudice (1994), which sold more than 700,000 copies and became her highest-selling album to date, aided by its lead single "In Love with You". She experimented further with jazz and adult contemporary genres on My Love Emotion (1995), while she recorded covers on Retro (1996). After she left PolyGram to sign with Mark J. Feist's MJF Company in 1998, she released the R&B-influenced album Drawn. Velasquez's follow-up record, R2K (1999), was supported by remakes of "On the Wings of Love", "I'll Never Love This Way Again", and "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", and was subsequently certified twelve-times platinum by the Philippine Association of the Record Industry (PARI).

Velasquez played leading roles in the romantic comedies Kailangan Ko'y Ikaw (2000) and Pangako Ikaw Lang (2001), and received the Box Office Entertainment Award for Box Office Queen for the latter. Her performance as an intellectually disabled woman in an episode of the anthology series Maalaala Mo Kaya (2001) earned her a Star Award for Best Actress. She later starred in the prime time television series Forever in My Heart (2004), Ako si Kim Samsoon (2008), Totoy Bato (2009), Diva (2010), I Heart You, Pare! (2011), and Poor Señorita (2016). Velasquez also won the Golden Screen Award for Best Actress for playing a document forger in the comedy film Of All the Things (2012). She expanded her career into reality television talent shows as a presenter on Star for a Night (2002), Pinoy Pop Superstar (2004), and The Clash (2018), and as a judge on StarStruck (2015) and Idol Philippines (2019).

Having sold more than seven million records domestically and 1.5 million in Asia, Velasquez is the best-selling Filipino music artist of all time. Her accolades include two Asian Television Awards, two MTV Asia Awards, 22 Awit Awards, 17 Aliw Awards (including 3 Entertainer of the Year wins), 22 Box Office Entertainment Awards, and 16 Star Awards for Music. Referred to as "Asia's Songbird", she has consistently been credited with inspiring a generation of Filipino singers.

Regine Velasquez-Alcasid sings "Araw-Gabi" LIVE on Wish 107.5 Bus (Power...

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#FibrExperience: OPM royalty Regine Velasquez-Alcasid shows everyone why she deserves to be called 'Asia's Songbird' as she effortlessly slays every high note of the timeless hit, "Araw-Gabi." The song was composed by multi-awarded Filipino songwriter, Mr. Ryan Cayabyab. *** Wish 107.5 is an all-hits FM radio station based in Quezon City, Philippines. It has truly gone out, beyond the conventional, to provide multiple platforms where great Filipino talents can perform and showcase their music. With the Wish 107.5 Bus, people now need not to buy concert tickets just to see their favorite artists perform on stage.

Voilà - Emma Kok & André Rieu - Lyrics

Emma Kok sings Voilà & André Rieu. André Rieu is a Dutch violinist and conductor best known for creating the waltz-playing Johann Strauss Orchestra. He was born on October 1, 1949, in Maastricht, Netherlands. Rieu comes from a musical family; his father was a conductor. He began playing the violin at the age of five. He studied violin at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège and at the Conservatorium Maastricht, from 1968 to 1973. Later, he attended the Music Academy in Brussels. Rieu formed the Johann Strauss Orchestra in 1987. The orchestra started with just 12 members but now performs with between 50 and 60 musicians. He gained international fame for reviving waltz music and bringing it to broader audiences. André Rieu is known for his charismatic stage presence and entertaining concerts, often performed in stunning settings like Vienna's Schönbrunn Palace. He has sold over 40 million CDs and DVDs and has earned more than 30 platinum and gold awards. His concerts have drawn millions of fans from around the world, and he continues to tour extensively. Rieu's work is often featured on classical music television channels, and he has a significant following on social media platforms. Lyrics: Écoutez moi Moi la chanteuse à demi Parlez de moi À vos amours, à vos amis Parlez-leur de cette fille aux yeux noirs Et de son rêve fou Moi c'que j'veux c'est écrire des histoires Qui arrivent jusqu'à vous C'est tout Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà qui je suis Me voilà même si mise à nue j'ai peur, oui Me voilà dans le bruit et dans le silence Regardez moi Ou du moins ce qu'il en reste Regardez moi Avant que je me déteste Quoi vous dire, que les lèvres d'une autre Ne vous diront pas C'est peu de chose mais moi tout ce que j'ai Je le dépose là, voilà Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà qui je suis Me voilà même si mise à nue c'est fini C'est ma gueule c'est mon cri, me voilà tant pis Voilà, voilà, voilà Voilà juste ici Moi mon rêve, mon envie Comme j'en crève comme j'en ris Me voilà dans le bruit Et dans le silence Ne partez pas J'vous en supplie, restez longtemps Ça m'sauvera p't'être pas, non Mais faire sans vous j'sais pas comment Aimez-moi comme on aime un ami Qui s'en va pour toujours J'veux qu'on m'aime parce que moi je sais pas Bien aimer mes contours Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà qui je suis Me voilà même si mise à nue c'est fini Me voilà dans le bruit et dans la fureur aussi Regardez moi enfin et mes yeux et mes mains Tout c'que j'ai est ici, c'est ma gueule c'est mon cri Me voilà, me voilà, me voilà Voilà, voilà Voilà, voilà Voilà!

Richard Clayderman - La Mer (Beyond The Sea) @TatianaBlue

Somewhere beyond the sea, Somewhere waiting for me, My lover stands on golden sands And watches the ships that go sailing. Somewhere beyond the sea She's there watching for me. If I could fly like birds on high Then straight to her arms I'd go sailing.'' http://www.clayderman.co.uk Select the optimal resolution 720p Thank you all for viewing and comments! All the best!

Violin Concerto No 1 In G Minor: Adagio - James Last

Elsa Esnoult - Souviens-toi [CLIP OFFICIEL]

Qui n’a jamais connu un amour de vacances… c’est le thème du nouveau titre d’Elsa Esnoult, « Souviens-toi » extrait de son album « 5 ». Avec beaucoup de sensibilité et de sensualité, Elsa nous chante les regrets d’une histoire d’amour trop courte. Tourné sur les plages de Love Island, ce clip nous ramène en vacances pour notre plus grand plaisir…

Great Pianists DESTROY Piano for 14 Minutes Straight (Volume up!)

I'm excited to share some of the most climactic powerful and thrilling moments from the repertoire of the world's finest pianists. Denis Matsuev, Lang Lang, Khatia Buniatishvili, Grigory Sokolov, Alexei Grynyuk, Yuja Wang, Giorgy Cziffra and Vladimir Horowitz deliver performances of nothing but sheer intensity and passion as they masterfully command the instrument. NOTE: The video may be challenging to view (to listen) due to its apocalyptic mood. Original videos:    • Denis Matsuev - Grieg / Ginzburg: Pee...      • Lang Lang Plays Rach 3 Ossia Cadenza      • Khatia Buniatishvili - Liszt/Horowitz...      • S. Prokofiev : Sonata no. 7 op. 83 in...      • Alexei Grynyuk - liszt Hungarian Rhap...      • i've got goosebumps all over my body..      • Yuja Wang - Turkish March Mozart (Enc...      • Cziffra plays Liszt's Étude d’exécuti...      • VLADIMIR HOROWITZ PLAYS SCRIABIN "Ver...      • Vladimir Horowitz - Variation on a th...  

Symphony guide: Webern's op 21

This article is more than 10 years old

In this luminous, miniature symphony, time goes backwards as well as forwards. It's an extraordinary work.

The symphonic principle, as we've been discovering, can take in a gigantic range of interpretations.

Anton Webern's Symphony, Op 21 for strings (without double-basses), harp, clarinet, bass clarinet, and two horns is a piece that takes the idea of symphonic self-referentiality to an intensely concentrated extreme, and it's so focused in its choice of notes and precise disposition of rhythm and texture, that the result is a distilled expression and extension of symphonic logic into every dimension of music that's pretty well unparalleled in the story of the symphony. The paradox is that this apparently tiny, pocket-sized piece (its full score is written on just 16 pages), does things with the most important elements of all, our old friends musical space and time, that much grander symphonies take ten times as long to achieve. And Webern's Symphony manages something even more remarkable: the whole academic discourse of score-based musical analysis is (or was) based on proving how "organic" and "logical" symphonic structures can be, supposedly endowing Beethoven's music, say, with the objective power and glory of natural phenomena. But Webern's little symphony is probably the most genuinely "organic" symphony ever composed, in the sense of creating networks of connections between its smallest scales and its largest dimensions, so that there's a symbiotic relationship between the way every fragment of motive and melody sounds and the shape of the whole symphony. That all-pervasive connectivity, this "striving for unity", as Webern put it, was inspired by his love of nature (Webern was a keen alpinist); as he said, referring to Goethe's idea of the "Urpflanze" - the ur-plant: "the root is really nothing other than the stalk, the stalk nothing other than the leaf, the leaf again nothing other than the blossom: variations of the same idea." 

Composed in 1928, the Symphony is in two movements, a two-part first movement, with both halves repeated, which is based on the idea of complex species of canon, in which the same, or similar, musical material is played by different combinations of instruments. (What's a canon? Think of a round such as London's Burning only much, much more complicated, in this case...) Webern told Schoenberg that this movement lasted 15 minutes; in fact, it's more like seven in performance. The second movement is a three-minute set of variations on an 11-bar theme, which crams in as much expressivity as the variation-based finale of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, but on a somewhat more concentrated scale!  Now, if you want to delve into the canonic complexities of Webern's symphony, or the subtleties of the way it manipulates its 12-tone row, I refer you to composer George Benjamin's essay on the Symphony, as well as his thoughts on the piece in a collection of essays published for Alexander Goehr's 70th birthday. George describes the idea of the canon in the first movement: "The simultaneous ramifications on past, present, and future inherent in any one creative decision provide a sustaining context, the sequential nature of canon literally pulling the music forwards, devouring empty manuscript paper ahead". But he finds poetry in all this constructivism: this first movement of the Symphony seems "weightless - a complex, crystal-like object hovering in space". And that's the greatest connection of all: between the way this music is made, and the sounds it makes.

Benjamin's description beautifully captures the sense of stasis in this first movement of the Symphony, the uncanny feeling that time is not moving like an unstoppable arrow, but rather softly expanding and exploding in all directions, like the growth of a crystal - or, since it's nearly Christmas, a snowflake. The limpid clarity of the music, the spaces and silences around the musical material in the orchestration, the fact that Webern makes it impossible for you to miss a single note, and that each pitch has its own definite meaning and expression - it's all part of the articulation of the structure of the music. Every line you're hearing is a usually symmetrical fragment of the grander design of the 12-note row - itself symmetrically constructed - that the whole piece is based on. You literally hear time going backwards as well as forwards in this music, since Webern's canons play with the fact that the second six notes of the row are a transposed version of the first six, played backwards, and there are also bigger symmetries at work, to do with the shapes of both halves of the movement.

Keeping up? Not sure I am, but that's not the point! Rather, the thing is that all of this structural unity creates a symphonic form that sounds neither completely predictable nor totally random. When you listen to the Symphony, you're taken in by the centripetal concentration of the music, and you're set out on a meditative journey in the first movement into a vortex of almost infinite musical connectivity. This is an emotionally moving experience, too, in the range of expression Webern conjures, which includes heightened, violent lyricism as well as pointillist brilliance.

The connections continue in the Variations movement, in which the second half of each tiny variation - from a march to a moto perpetuo, from a lyrical reflection to an enigmatic coda - contains the same notes as the first half, played backwards, and in which the whole movement pivots around its exact middle point, the 4th variation. Webern himself was pretty thrilled with what he'd discovered in this piece: "Greater coherence cannot be achieved. Not even the Netherlanders [the Renaissance polyphonists like Ockeghem, whose music Webern had intensely studied] have managed this … The entire movement thus represents in itself a double canon with retrograde motion … What you see here (retrograde, canon, etc. - it is always the same) is not to be thought os as 'Kunststückerln' [artistic tricks] - that would be ridiculous! As many connections as possible should be created, and you will have to admit that there are many connections here!"

But I think George Benjamin again gets closer to what it's like to listen to this Symphony: "Paradoxically, this product of hermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, that emotion evenly diffused across the whole surface of the music. Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity." 

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