Sometimes it just takes a little help from above. A recent coincidence at the Salzburg Festival ensured that the exceptional pianist Yuja Wang finally made her long-overdue solo debut at the Haus für Mozart last Friday.
If a certain Tabitha King hadn’t taken another careful look in her garbage can in the early 1970s and accidentally discovered a manuscript by her husband Stephen, his book “Carrie” would never have been published and would have become a worldwide success. Sometimes art just needs help from fate. Unfortunately, pianist Evgeny Kissin didn’t mean it so well recently, but it did all the better for Yuja Wang. Kissin had to cancel his solo concert in Salzburg because of arm pain. An equal and, above all, spontaneous replacement was needed, and if anyone in the industry stands for spontaneity, then it’s Yuja Wang. In addition to her spontaneity, the New Yorker by choice is known for her virtuoso technique, her fine emotional instinct and her love for sky-high shoes by the French master shoemaker Christian Louboutin, on whose red soles she prefers to enter the big stages of this world and also her first evening in Salzburg. She owed her great career start to her spontaneity. In 2007, at the age of 20, she had her breakthrough when she stood in for legendary pianist Martha Argerich with the renowned Boston Symphony Orchestra. A steep career followed, which brought her to the Salzburg Festival in 2015 together with violinist Leonidas Kavakos. At that time, Yuja Wang was only 28 and kept the audience enthusiastic alongside her established colleague. So why did it have to take so long before she finally got her well-deserved solo debut at the festival, while long-established colleagues such as Maurizio Pollini have been performing seemingly always the same programs for years go in and out of the festival? When the time finally came last Friday evening at the Haus für Mozart, it was surprisingly evident that even a star of Wang’s caliber can obviously still feel something like excitement. Visibly tense and, above all, highly concentrated, she approached the works of Schubert, Schönberg and Ligeti. That made the first half of the concert sparkling clean, but a bit technical and controlled. The second half turned out to be much more relaxed and in the final works by Albéniz she seemed to be completely grooved in with instrument and space. The audience acknowledged this with great applause and many Bravos, which finally took the burden off Wang’s shoulders. And suddenly she stood there like a phoenix from the ashes, the spontaneous, cheeky and emotional pianist. True to the motto “work first, then pleasure”, she treated herself and the audience to half an hour full of different encores from Schubert to Glass to Jazz and above all one thing: lots of fun. Larissa Schuetz
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