***** (5 stars)
“What a Joy!”
What an incredible way to start the day!
Ryan Wang is a young Canadian pianist who waslast year’s BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. Earlier this year he won the Canadian Chopin Piano Competition, and today was, at the age of eighteen, the International Festival’s youngest-ever Queens Hall recitalist. Ryan chose to give us an all-Chopin programme which displayed both the vast breadth and depth of the composer’s skill and the incredible talent of the pianist presenting his music.
The 24 Preludes, Op 28 take us through the cycle of keys, both major and minor, starting with C major and ending with D minor. Their immense variety of both style and mood offer the pianist a magnificent showcase for their technical ability and emotional range, from the opening rippling agitato to the closing stormy allegro appassionato. Ryan’s ability is simply breathtaking. There aren’t enough superlatives to describe his mastery of touch, tone, dynamic contrast, and mood. He’s brilliant in the showy bits, has power and passion when required, but is gentle, tender and delicate too. At one point his painissimo was so quiet I thought the sound would dissolve into nothing – and then sparkling cascades of notes or passionate, resounding chords would ring through the Queens Hall. The audience were silent in rapt admiration – until they burst into prolonged applause after the final prelude.
After the interval we heard three Mazurkas Op.59 – lively dances which started off conventionally enough but went off into brilliantly executed flights of fancy. Chopin’s Piano sonata no 2 in B flat minor followed, with an ever-changing stream of emotions – stormy, furious, sorrowful, lyrical, solemn and tender by turn. The Variations on ‘Là ci darem la Mano’ in B flat Op2, written when the composer was only seventeen, closed the official part of the programme. It was a joy to hear someone only a little older playing this exuberant, extravagant, passionate show-off piece, which rightly received a standing ovation.
But it didn’t stop there. With the energy and enthusiasm of youth, Ryan returned to give us not one, not two or three, but FOUR encores. A joyful waltz and two other Chopin pieces I couldn’t name were all ecstatically received – surely that would be it? But no, Ryan came out again, settled to the keyboard, and began a wondrously quiet and gentle rendition of Beethoven’s Für Elise – the perfect way to calm us and send us out into the city, I thought. But then it evolved into the most wonderful display of jazz and boogie I think I’ve ever heard in the oh-so-respectable Queens Hall. Here was an amazingly talented young man letting his hair down and having a ball – what a privilege it was to be a part of it.
Then he closed the piano lid and left the platform for the final time.
What a morning! What a talent! What a joy!
EIF: Ryan Wang, The Queen’s Hall for more information go to: https://www.eif.co.uk/events/ryan-wang
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