Yuja Wang’s latest recital at the Festival Hall was a dazzling, at times beguiling affair, carefully structured and executed with her customary flamboyance, glamour and elegance. Chopin’s four Ballades formed the second half of the programme, but before the interval came works from around 1950: Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E Flat Minor, and a selection of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues.
Barber’s Sonata is a stark work, dissonant to the point of atonality and strikingly edgy, from a composer sometimes considered, by no means accurately, to be essentially post-Romantic. Wang’s performance was a thing of contrasts, as fierce aggression (the opening was very hard-edged) jostled with the dark, weighty lyricism of the slow movement and the spectral filigree of the brief, oddly aphoristic scherzo. The strenuous fugal finale, flung out with almost devil-may-care bravado, formed an effective link to the Shostakovich preludes and fugues, which followed with barely a break. Even in extracts, the emotional range is uncommonly wide, embracing everything from knowing urbanity (the brilliantly sardonic F Sharp Minor Prelude, in particular) to the clarity and timelessness of Bach, on whose work they were modelled. Wang probed their subtleties and ironies with wonderfully understated virtuosity.
