This new concerto is played backless
NewsThe third piano concerto by Magnus Lindberg received its world premiere in San Francisco on Friday night. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the San Francisco Symphony.
The soloist was Yuja Wang.
Here’s what she tweeted.
A few impressions of this week’s world premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the @SFSymphony and @esapekkasalonen.
Photos by Kristen Loken pic.twitter.com/Um89AYHcbq— Yuja (@YujaWang) October 16, 2022
When will we see here the comment related Yuja’s music talent, and her fashion choices?
Any insights on the actual performance?
So what.
Did she play well ?
Yuja can wear whatever she likes – her playing is fabulous. The headline here focuses on the wrong aspects.
And your point is?
If you can play brilliantly and want to fill the hall, then you don’t need gimmicks.
everyone knows yuja doesnt need her dresses to be awesome. but we love them and she’s badass 🙂
She plays brilliantly AND she fills halls. Period.
Good for her! Our community orchestra mandates the ladies wear sleeves to the wrist–boring and less attractive. Performance should be about both the music and the presentation.
Never heard it called ‘wrist-boring’ before. Either way, an entirely understandable response in this case . . .
Just curious. Supposing the ladies turned up to a performance not wearing the prescribed mandate, what would happen? Would they be prevented from playing? (Might be a bit awkward should one of the ladies be a first flute!)
How do the ladies feel? Should they get together and flout the rules?
If I ever visit your orchestra to help out I will be able to explain a way they can follow that rule to the letter and be quite the opposite. (As I will likely not see this comment again I will explain, they may still dress to the wrist but should instead begin at the hand. I hope my contribution to world culture gets as much exposure – perhaps more – as the one here)
It used to be borderline creepy. Now it’s the full thing !
looking forward to the Recital with Mattila.
No comment about the premiere of a new piano concerto by an important contemporary composer?
Just plain boring, a clothes horse, and a distraction from the music.
Compared to Karita in her “topless” look (see earlier news item), this is just plain tacky and sad. With Karita I know it’s about a supreme artist and supreme artistry. And maybe a twinkle of her humour.
Here, Ms Wang just wants wagging tongues and “likes.” Maybe Wang is just an exhibitionist at heart? Imagine a male doing something similar and he’d be in jail for indecent exposure!
At least many of the old men in the audience did not fall asleep….
Lindberg’s 2nd piano concerto is a well-crafted mélange of Ravelian textures, colors, and figures–allusions often so flagrant they are more than a little ironic. One sees, as with Boulez, how the hardcore and absolutist modernists of the 70s retreated to more flexible postmodern trends.
Essa-Pekka, Kaija, and Magnus have become a ruling trio, tellingly beloved by the classical music establishment. It’s difficult to say if their work is a movement forward, or more a descent into Nordic, bourgeois propriety, a kind of well-behaved music without sharp edges, and with a patina of sophistication that the suits the fashionable plutocracy that controls the classical music world, especially in the English-speaking countries.
They are hardly alone. For the last half century, there have been no significant classical music composers who meaningfully challenge the status quo, who present a genuinely new musical language, much less a new vision of society and the world. Sure, there have been some political works, but all on suitably generic themes so as to avoid stepping on any toes–e.g. the fake naughtiness of composers like Nico Muhly and Mark-Anthony Turnage. Given the power structures of classical music, truly challenging composers are not even be allowed to appear. How do we escape the downward spiral of a dead and irrelevant art form that seems unable to do little more than celebrate bourgeois banality with well-made pastiches of Ravel? The issue isn’t music performed backless, but music that is spineless in its conformity and a lack of vision.
I’m confused about the headline. Was the back of the piano removed? Or was the last page of the score missing?
Here’s a positive review from Seen and Heard
https://seenandheard-international.com/2022/10/yuja-wang-triumphs-in-magnus-lindbergs-new-piano-concerto-with-the-san-francisco-symphony/
I have a different take: that dress would definitely help me get through Lindberg’s work and all that timpani pounding. At least it’s something different (both the music and the dress).