Yuja to lead orchestra in Paris
NewsThe pianist will lead the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the Paris Philharmonie in January.
The programme includes Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, directed from the keyboard.
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Delightful programming!
Yes, and very entertaining.
A formidable program! Here’s wishing her the best of luck with it, and hoping there will be some video documentation.
She’s already bored with playing the piano?
Sure. Just like Mitsuko Uchida.
My boss was Daniel Barenboim for more than 16 years. He played the piano frequently. Didn’t seem bored by it.
This is playing without a conductor, not really conducting. I don’t think she will be involved with the Dvořák piece. However, based on prior evidence (she already played the first two Beethoven concertos with the same orchestra without a conductor in 2017; you can find recordings on YouTube), I don’t doubt the end result will be better than with a conductor involved.
Isn’t it interesting that the utterly gender obsessed US music journalists have steadfastly ignored her for several years now? They only deigned to write about her when it would be truly weird not to, like when she did that Rachmaninoff marathon at the Carnegie Hall. They would much rather promote inferior white male pianists instead. Keep this in mind the next time they champion another substandard DEI concoction.
This woman is amazing. Is there anything she cannot do? Is there any work she cannot play? What a phenomenal memory, just for starters.
I see her eventually moving into conducting itself.
Great to see her broadening her repertoire all the time.
Old news, the concert with Yuja as pianist and conductor has been announced for ages.
The Stravinsky is tricky…and orchestras don’t play it often. Wishing all the best of luck!
I doubt she’ll be conducting the Dvořák, a piece she has probably never heard of…
Anyone can conduct these days.
playing ánd conducting the Stravinsky concerto for piano and winds: chapeau!
This is the first time I’ve ever seen Ferde Grofé, who orchestrated Rhapsody in Blue, get any credit on a programme! Did Gershwin orchestrate his later works? -Porgy and Bess, for example?
Yes, Gershwin orchestrated Porgy and Bess himself. Critic/composer Virgil Thomson described the result as “gefilte fish orchestration.” I have never understood what he meant.
He also found Sibelius Second “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description.” Hell hath no fury like a mediocrity encountering genius.
From William R. Trotter’s excellent biography of Dimitri Mitropoulos, regarding critics’ reactions to The Minnesota Orchestra’s 1943 performance in New York City under Mitropoulos’ direction:
“…Virgil Thomson sniffed disdainfully at the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony (he leaned over to his companion’s ear as the first lugubrious bars were being played by the low strings and whispered: ‘Strained stool!’)…”
In the early 1940s, a few years after George’s death, his estate’s music editor Frank Campbell-Watson commissioned full symphonic arrangements of Gershwin’s major works heard in the concert hall today. “Rhapsody in Blue” was re-scored for full orchestra by Ferde Grofé, who had arranged the original 1924 jazz band version. Campbell-Watson himself revised “An American in Paris” (with incorrectly tuned car horns). Robert McBride re-did both the “Second Rhapsody” and the first orchestral version of “Girl Crazy Overture”; the original Broadway overture was scored by Robert Russell Bennett, who also extracted a symphonic suite from “Porgy & Bess.” Some 40 years after McBride’s “Girl Crazy” edition, the Gershwin Trust asked Don Rose to do a symphonic arrangement that hewed more closely to Bennett’s original overture to the show, which is why “Girl Crazy” exists in three sanctioned editions.
Thank you for the information. I remember Robert McBride; an unjustly forgotten figure.
More importantly: What will she be wearing while conducting from the keyboard?
Clothes?
something tight and short.
Zayin, how are such comments tolerated on this site… NL, you like this sort of hatefulness?
” Conducting is the easy alternative.” Gustav Leonhardt
She’s dating a conductor and must have learned a thing or two about holding a stick.
Joking aside, if she were to conduct and play using a stick that would be impressive indeed. Seriously though, I am sure she will receive some top-notch coaching from her partner. And playing and conducting the Stravinsky is in itself quite a feat.
Anyone who is a woman (or claim to be one) or black people can be a conductor these days. The western orchestras are just doing whatever to hurt the classical music and to make their sense of sin less heavy.