Mendelssohn in Verbier

Yuja Wang scintillates in live performance

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Felix Mendelssohn

Genre:

DVD

Label: Idealeaudience

Media Format: Digital Versatile Disc

Media Runtime: 100

Mastering:

Stereo
DDD

Catalogue Number: 3079248

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Sextet Felix Mendelssohn, Composer
David Aaron Carpenter, Viola
Felix Mendelssohn, Composer
Kirill Troussov, Violin
Leigh Mesh, Double bass
Maxim Rysanov, Viola
Sol Gabetta, Cello
Yuja Wang, Piano
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 Felix Mendelssohn, Composer
Felix Mendelssohn, Composer
Kurt Masur, Conductor
Verbier Festival Orchestra
Yuja Wang, Piano
Symphony No. 3, 'Scottish' Felix Mendelssohn, Composer
Felix Mendelssohn, Composer
Kurt Masur, Conductor
Verbier Festival Orchestra
Recorded live at the 16th Verbier Festival in 2009, this is a real treat for ears and eyes. The Verbier house style is to produce an entirely black surround to the stage, so that the musicians perform in a focused pool of light. Even the front row of the audience is barely visible. Top-lighting lends a burnished glow to the patina of the string instruments and a crisp detail to each shot. Director François-René Martin is not as rigidly formulaic as the BBC’s house style of cutting at each orchestral cue (“See? This is where the clarinets come in, just in case you haven’t heard them”) but steers us through each score, none the less, with ease and lucidity.

Yuja Wang’s studio recordings for DG have established her as a major talent but in concert she is electrifying, an artist who clearly relishes performing in public and cannot wait to share with the audience her palpable joy in music-making. She sets out her credentials as a natural Mendelssohn-player in a scintillating, finely honed performance of the 15-year-old composer’s Piano Sextet. For all its reliance on Weber and Hummel, it is a radiant, captivating work we should hear more often. The mid-performance smiles on the faces of the string players say it all.

Yuja Wang despatches the G minor Concerto in equally thrilling style, her articulation, speed and flawless accuracy matched only by her lingering caressing of the slow movement. She also takes risks (which all come off), but how such a slip of a girl can play with such power and sonority I still have to work out. Early in the first movement, co-ordination goes slightly awry on four down-beats (from 29'57"). Is it Masur we hear shout something – perhaps “Watch me!”? More justifiably it should have been Miss Wang shouting “Keep up!”

The young players of the Verbier orchestra respond to Masur’s grim platform demeanour with a commendable rather than inspiring performance of Mendelssohn’s Scottish, the neatly turned Scherzo and the last movement’s grand coda notwithstanding. The bonus is an edge-of-the-seat performance of the Three Movements from Petrushka, the final item in Yuja Wang’s solo recital given the day after the concerto. She is the undoubted star of this DVD.

Explore the world’s largest classical music catalogue on Apple Music Classical.

Included with an Apple Music subscription. Download now.

Gramophone Print

  • Print Edition

From £6.67 / month

Subscribe

Gramophone Digital Club

  • Digital Edition
  • Digital Archive
  • Reviews Database
  • Full website access

From £8.75 / month

Subscribe

                              

If you are a library, university or other organisation that would be interested in an institutional subscription to Gramophone please click here for further information.