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.
If it seems odd to concentrate on the pianist in a work in which the solo piano is by no means always the centre of attention, that’s partly because the performance as a whole is not quite as convincing as it should be. It’s not just in the Joie du Sang movement that the symphony teeters on the edge of kitsch, and there are several other moments when Nelsons’ approach, particularly when combined with the brash playing of the Boston orchestra, emphasise that tendency.
Riccardo Chailly’s 1992 recording with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on Decca, or Esa-Pekka Salonen’s with the LA Philharmonic (Sony Classical), present a more rounded view of the whole work, which is after all a celebration of love. It was designed as the central panel of a triptych supposedly inspired by the Tristan and Isolde legend, though in reality it was surely an expression of Messiaen’s feelings for his student Yvonne Loriod, who would become his second wife, and for whom the piano part was written.
For its sheer brilliance, though, it’s Wang’s delivery of that piano part that really needs to be heard too.
Listen on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify
