Sorry, Yuja. This has to come out

From my new essay in The Critic, out today:

Possibly the last thing I expected to run into in this life was Yuja Wang playing Pierre Boulez at a David Hockney exhibition in a box-room behind London’s Eurostar terminal.

The incongruities are so fantastically disparate they defeat the act of criticism, which is helpful since the organisers made us sign a prior undertaking not to review the event. It was, they said, an experiment by the Chinese-US pianist, her repertoire decisions were spontaneous and the video elements might be controversial.

All of these arguments struck me as perfectly reasonable and I had no problem at all signing-up to the review ban. Up to the midpoint, that is, when I felt that what I was witnessing in the King’s Cross Lightroom might actually be the future of concerts for the rest of the century. And if that were so, I would be professionally obligated to share the event with history (sorry, Yuja)….

Read on here.