It would have been easy for a pianist of Yuja Wang’s charisma and effortless technical brilliance to play safe in the choice of what she plays. She could have confined herself to a handful of mainstream concertos and loaded her recital programmes with pieces that show off her jaw-dropping keyboard fluency. She certainly does play her fair share of flashy repertoire, but she has also gone out of her way to explore music that other pianists of her star quality often avoid. Her recitals and encores regularly take in Boulez’s Notations and études by Ligeti or Glass, while the works she has premiered include concertos by Tan Dun, John Adams and Magnus Lindberg.
Even though the solo piano’s role in Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony is not quite as prominent as it would be in a concerto, or as it is in fact in other Messiaen’s orchestral scores such as Oiseaux Exotiques, Couleurs de la Cité Celeste and ...Des Canyons aux Etoiles, the Turangalîla Symphony’s obbligato part has been part of Wang’s repertoire for some years. This recording is of a performance in Boston earlier this year, with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (which gave the first performance of Turangalîla in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein), and her playing is dazzling. Whether adding the most delicate filigree to the symphony’s more reflective movements, like the sixth, Jardín du Sommeil d’ Amour, providing virtuoso punctuation to the eighth, Développement de l’Amour, as the ondes Martenot (played by Cécile Lartigau) whoops and swoops around her, or ending the joyous eruption of the work’s most notorious movement, Joie du Sang des Étoiles, with a definitively explosive cadenza, her contribution is impossible to take for granted.
