concert review: Yuja! Yuja!

The ubiquitous and unsurpassed pianist Yuja Wang made another appearance at Davies with the SF Symphony to play two (fairly short) piano concertos in one concert, one before and one after intermission. The hall was, unusually, packed. EPS conducted.

First came Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. This was brisk, chippy, in the neoclassical spirit of the day. Yuja emphasized clarity over sheer power.

Then the First Concerto of Einojuhani Rautavaara. I was familiar with the composer but not the work. It had three movements of startlingly differing character. In the first, Yuja pounded out huge dissonant chords while the orchestra played gentler Nordic surges. In the second, Yuja turned to gentle, rather postmodern chord sequences, intermixed with tinkling runs, while the orchestra provided a quiet shimmering background. The third was a wild and rampant toccata.

After this, Yuja played two encores, the first a piece of Glassian minimalism with a lot of tremolo, the second one of her standard encores, an abridged arrangement of Marquez's Danzon No. 2.

What Yuja wears is always a topic of interest for her concerts. For Ravel she wore a long but slit black slinky number. For Rautavaara she changed to one of her sparkling minidresses.

The two concertos were surrounded by movements from Debussy's Images. Having had more than enough Debussy in the first part - his music tends to make me slightly nauseous - I decided not to stick around for the second.

Besides, I was thoroughly soaked. Having been dumped out by the city bus 3 1/2 blocks from the hall, I found that the previously merely persistent rain had enlarged itself into a downpour. It took me over a block to find a spot to shelter and wait it out - intense downpours never last long here - and I caught the brunt of it. My jacket, a light windbreaker, was still very damp when I got home, so I put it in the clothes dryer.