Yuja is back with Hockney
NewsThe Chinese-US pianist Yuja Wang is returning for six more immersive concerts at the David Hockney exhibition in London this September.
She says: ‘The concerts last year at Lightroom were completely different to any other performance and I cannot wait to return. It was intimate and extremely special to be surrounded by the audience and for us all to be enveloped by David’s visuals. His art deeply inspired my musical choices, fusing art and music in such a unique and meaningful way, which I’m excited to recreate.’
The previous concerts were unreviewed (with one exception) and were still the talk of the town.
Book here.
‘Immersive presentation’ of classical music is an attempt to adapt an art of interiority to the exteriority of a modernist world view: the idea that everything is materialistic and outward, and that music has to be ‘peppered-up’ to be able to be appreciated by the jaded senses of Western decadence.
Hockney is a typical product of the sixties – more like ‘advert art’ than anything else. It is not difficult to see. It’s nostalgia for enduring adolescence.
It should be noted that in the picture of that report, there are grave warning signs along the road.
Pseudo-intellectual psycho-babble.
Don’t tell me!
Sally
Just booked.
I attended last year and it was one of the most beautiful and indelible artistic experiences of my whole life. Unique.
Go, if you can
I don’t get it. I can either watch or listen. My one brain is not enough for both.
I have tried to listen to Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead while looking at the Arnold Böcklin’s painting on my iPad. Before long Böcklin claims my attention and Rachmaninov fades in the background.
What? Out of interest, would you say the same thing about ballet, you can either watch or listen but not both?
Each to their own but that seems very odd to me.
Ever go to opera or ballet?
@Michael, @GuestX
Good questions. Personally I am able to listen and watch ballet and opera, perhaps because music is naturally intertwined with stage action. Maybe they require a lower level of focus in visual detail than paintings or sculpture. Making sense?
Yes, it does make sense. Could it be the lack of congruity between music (moving through time) and a single painting (static) (and everything electronic, not live)? I can imagine a quite different experience if the visual artist and the musician are collaborating creatively – with the visual display changing in reaction to the music, or vice versa. I would love to be able to go to this concert.
This isn’t Yuja playing while you look at paintings. Neither is it paintings as a backdrop to a piano recital. It is its own thing in the way that ballet and opera are much more than the sum of the parts.
The entire gallery space including the floor is dynamically transformed by Hockney’s imagery as Yuja plays. At other times the walls are dominated by close up views of the artist and keyboard giving you a much better view of the artist’s technique than you would ever get at a recital, even if you had front row seats.
Particularly memorable were the close up, sometimes uncomfortably intrusive close up shots of Yuja’s facial expressions during fiendishly difficult passages revealing the super-human focus, concentration and energy that is required to play at this level.
It isn’t the future of concerts. It’s a unique multimedia experience and well worth attending if you can.
So is it similar the visual immersives (Van Gogh, Vatican…), but with live music and incorporating close ups of the musician?
Good camera work can indeed enhance a musical experience. Personally I like a lot the videos at allofbach.com. If, however, a video is focused on close ups, especially of facial expressions, to me it feels unnatural and distracting. It’s vastly different from watching opera or ballet from a seat in the auditorium. I do enjoy operas on DVD, but primarily performances from the 1970s and 1980s, with naturalistic productions and not overactive camera work.
If Yuja does something similar on my side of the pond, I’ll consider it. Meantime, enjoy and let us know.
With opera and ballet the music is part of the total work, the music expressing the ‘inside’ of what we see on stage.
A pro quo rien du tout….
I have witnessed Indian Olympic wrestlers (modern ballet take note ?) train to ever increasing Raga rhythms and at the Turkish Kirkpinaar (Ederne) wrestlers Dance after victory to traditional music
…not Nuriev like but Dance nevertheless .
Nurse.quick an Aspirin !
Enough of this ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’. Both sound and vision enter our consciousness from outside, through sense organs, eyes and ears. The visual aspect is no more and no less ‘interior’ than the audio one. Or do you really believe that somehow listening to music puts you on a higher plane of spirituality than contemplating a painting or watching a dance?
Of course listening to music takes place on a higher spiritual, or better said: higher mental, plane. That is something different from ‘listening to music puts you (as a person) on a higher plane of spirituality’. That is confusing the perception process with the person. The abstract nature of music (being non-conceptual) has always been recognized throughout the ages. Poets & philosophers have been sensitive to that aspect, but in a more materialistic age, the immaterial nature of music is more difficult to grasp for some people.
OK, music takes place on a higher mental plane because of its abstract, immaterial, nature. Does this mean that abstract art takes place on a higher mental plane (although of course lower than music) than representational art?
What I would like to know is whether she’ll preform in Verbier this summer. My parents have tickets and she’s still on the Verbier website but all the dates have been removed from her own website. Given that she’s due to perform with Mäkelä and the fact that she’s cancelled everything else with him, I wonder if she’ll be there…
It hasn’t been confirmed by Verbier, but she has effectively cancelled. They’re looking for replacements right now.
It sounds cool. And how is it different, really, from the ballet? You have music, you have visuals. Immersive experience.
Exactly! It’s the immersion that counts, the rest is pseudo intellectual blah-blah. When I work and have to type these tedious letters, I have my cell phone immersing me with stuff like Haas and then, I’m floating.
Sally
At around 3x the price I paid last year!
She is the future of classical music…I hope she comes back to the CSO…conductors come and go, but the artist drive the energy!
Asians and Finns are the future of Western classical music.
Can that be long trousers in the photo??!!?? How did this premiere pass unnoticed?
This is good. More of this please Yuja. Note to other pianists: ask your agent about combining forces with those “immersive Van Gogh” type exhibits scattered throughout the planet.
Yuja is a superstar. I would jet to wherever she was playing, if I had the dough-re-mi. I will see/listen to her when she is in/near Wash DC.