Weekend watch: Yuja goes boogie on Mozart’s Turk

Alistair Hinton says:

Oh, lighten up, for heaven’s sake! This is just a piece of fun! I’m sure that this is what Volodos intended it to be. Apart from the obvious importance of crediting people correctly with what they have, rather than what they haven’t, done and getting the facts straight, why would it really matter in principle whether it was an improvisation rather than a written down transcription? Of the many pianists who have doe this kind of thing, the most notable was arguably Cziffra, who certainly didn’t write down all of his. It can be done on a much more serious level, too, hence the best of Liszt’s operatic fantasies, not to mention the four paraphrases on waltzes by Johann Strauss II to which Godowsky gave the elevated title “Symphonic Metamorphoses”.

Yuja has treated this piece as what it deserves to be (just as she does the Cziffra Tritsch-Tratsch Polka transcription, for example); she’s hardly trying to contend that it should be listened to as though it were the Goldberg’s, the Hammerklavier or Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a theme of Bach! It was obviously played as an encore (though I do not know to what), just so that she, the orchestra and the audience could let their respective hair down, so keep yours on, please!