Mess with Yuja Wang at your peril. For anyone still in doubt of her temperament after last week, here she was, exploding into the solo part of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 1969 Piano Concerto No 1. It’s a monumental work demanding considerable physicality – at several points the soloist all but attacked the keyboard, slapping the keys in clusters or using a forearm to thump out the shape of the melody. Wang was formidable, Rautavaara’s dense writing providing an ideal showcase for her bright clarity. And the orchestra was just adversarial enough, thanks to the judgment of Tarmo Peltokoski, the Finnish conductor making his LSO debut.
Wang gave us three encores, starting with a richly singing Barcarolle by the Finnish composer Erkki Melartin and finishing with Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No 6, a duet for which she was joined by Peltokoski, no mean pianist himself. In between came the highlight: her own arrangement of the desperate second movement of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8, dispatched with exhilarating virtuosity.
