Seeing and listening, occipital and temporal. The ways in which visual artists and musicians unite would take books to untangle, not a few provisional paragraphs. That said: last week the pianist Yuja Wang returned to the Lightroom, King’s Cross in London to perform seven one-hour-long recitals surrounded by David Hockney’s art, projected and many times enlarged all around the hangar-like cube space. (She played there last year, but reviews were not permitted.) Music has been a subject for artists since antiquity. Many painters are musicians, some musicians painters. As last Friday was his 150th birthday, let’s single out Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), serious painter, even more serious composer. The Wang-Hockney collaboration is a different endeavour: a virtuoso musician and a visual artist existing alongside each other, one discrete practice informing the other.
Hockney is, probably not too strong a word, obsessed with music but does not make it or, except in his arresting stage designs, paint it. Wang is not the first to “play to” art. The composer-pianist Philip Glass, one of whose études Wang included at the Lightroom, started out playing in art galleries, mainly because no one wanted his music elsewhere. He continued the habit long after achieving success, performing in New York and Paris inside installations by his friend, the sculptor Richard Serra. The difference is that Serra’s work, colossal, inscrutable, is preoccupied with mass and form. You can imagine his weighty monuments forming a brilliant acoustic backdrop for Glass’s musical energy.
Hockney’s art, by contrast, if anyone needs reminding, is about image, colour, space, movement; trees, fields, flowers, leaves, human bodies, water, landscape. His visual abundance encapsulates the joy of life itself. The title of his show at the Lightroom – 10 scenes from which were recut for Wang’s recital – is Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), which says it all.
Questions arose as we waited for Wang, the grand piano dwarfed by one of Hockney’s recent Normandy landscapes. How could the dizzying toccatas of Samuel Barber or Serge Prokofiev, or a crazily teeming étude by Franz Liszt find air and resonance? Would the rich, detailed images become illustrative, or the music merely a soundtrack? How would our ears function in the face of this visual onslaught and was it just a gimmick? The answer came immediately the music began: absolutely not. Wang chose short and by no means obvious works that, for her, resonated with Hockney, from Debussy to Berio, Ligeti and more. Rachmaninov’s early Elégie Op 3 No 1 made a strange and haunting partner to the hot oranges and ochres of the Grand Canyon.
At times the camera fixed on Wang herself: hands in assorted closeups, or seen from above. The most literal match, overwhelming in impact, was Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, in which a heady green landscape appeared, via iPad, before our eyes, with rain falling in grey, splashy stair rods, ever more dense. JS Bach’s prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, quiet after a noisy storm of Prokofiev, was also affecting. The image here was Hockney’s Queen Elizabeth II window for Westminster Abbey, set against black.
The recital series (all sold out, with one added late to meet demand) came about after Wang first visited the Lightroom and jumped at the suggestion she perform there. A regular visitor to the 87-year-old artist’s London studio, she plays for Hockney privately: an intimate side of the pianist not necessarily seen at her concert appearances. Theirs is a friendship that makes sense. Wang’s individuality, her rebellious sense of style, above all her inexhaustible pleasure in playing the piano – all those encores – surely appeals directly to Hockney, himself unstoppable, hard-working and restlessly inventive. This inimitable project, a storming success, cannot be an exact model for future concerts, but it extends the boundaries and shows new possibilities. We are thankful for it.
At the Proms, almost over for this year, Simon Rattle arrived to a big-hearted welcome, with the orchestra of which he is now chief conductor: the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO, or Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks). Their first programme (Prom 61) included Bruckner’s Symphony No 4 and a UK premiere by Thomas Adès, Aquifer (2024), luxuriant, fluent and gurglingly expansive. It was written for Rattle, a long-term champion, and the orchestra. After the performance, Rattle presented Adès with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s gold medal: they are now both recipients, together with Brahms, Sibelius and one or two other notables (Stravinsky, Elgar, Britten… the list is long).
The BRSO has an entirely different sound from the Berlin Philharmonic (who happened to come to the Proms and play Bruckner last month, prompting unhelpful comparisons). They are placed differently on stage: horns to the right of the conductor, trumpets left, violas between violins and cellos and so on. Section principals are team players rather than stars (though in their own way, they are that too). There’s a great sense of communion: they embrace each other at the end, where other orchestras shake hands. The Bruckner, reflecting this, was beautifully integrated, the woodwind and brass solos elegant and never showy. As befits this 19th-century depiction of medievalism, the mood was yearning and romantic, horn calls poetic, almost veiled and wistful. Rattle had made his own adjustments to the unwieldy last movement (interviewed on Radio 3, he said he estimated there are 14 versions of this symphony), finding a balance Bruckner would surely have wanted.
The next night (Prom 62) featured one work, Mahler’s Symphony No 6 “Tragic”, which the orchestra have toured with Rattle several times this season and play with striking conviction. Mahler can, to say the least, be overblown, leaving little to the imagination. (A musically knowledgable friend, a Mahler sceptic, made a comparison with Dating Naked UK. I bow to their wisdom.) This was taut, intense, clothed with exactly the right degree of revelation and restraint, and all the more potent for it.
Star ratings (out of five)
Yuja Wang x Hockney ★★★★
Prom 61 ★★★★
Prom 62 ★★★★★
All Proms are on BBC Sounds. The Proms season ends tonight
