Piano Street's Classical Piano Blog

Chinese pianist, 22-year-old Yuja Wang thrilled international audiences with her opening performance alongside conductor Claudio Abbado at the Lucerne Festival on August 12.

Unique Webcast from Lucerne in August 2009:

http://www.medici.tv/#/performance/613/ (free sign up)

“Last year, when Claudio Abbado saw me playing Franz Liszt´s Sonata on French television, he compared me to talented female pianist Martha Argerich and then sent me an invitation to cooperate. In March this year we had our first cooperation and this is the second one”, Wang explained.

Usually, musicians who work with Abbado are well-known masters such as Maurizio Pollini. However this year Abbado made an exception. Yuja is an exclusive recording artist for Deutsche Grammophon. For her debut recording, titled Sonatas & Etudes, released in the spring of 2009, she presented a program of sonatas including Chopin´s “Funeral March”, Liszt´s Sonata in B minor, Scriabin´s Sonata no. 2, and etudes by Ligeti.

Wang continues: “The piece was chosen by Abbado and I think it is quite suitable for an opening concert. It is a vivid and exciting work in which the soloist and orchestra play their own strong roles during the performance. It demonstrates the charm of the orchestra while revealing the delicate sound of the piano. When we were on the stage, there was a wonderful interaction between the orchestra and Abbado”.

Website: www.yujawang.com

Article from the California Chronicle

Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No. 3

Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No. 3, sheet music to download and print:

Of the five piano concertos written by Prokofiev, the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26, has garnered the greatest popularity and critical acclaim. The concerto radiates a crisp vitality that testifies to Prokofiev’s inventive prowess in punctuating lyrical passages with witty dissonances, while maintaining a balanced partnership between the soloist and orchestra. Unlike the examples of piano concertos set by many of Prokofiev’s Romantic forebears, the orchestra rises above subsidiary accompaniment to play a very active part in this work.

Prokofiev began work on the concerto as early as 1913 when he wrote a theme for variations which he then set aside. Although he revisited the sketches in 1916-17, he did not fully devote himself to the project until 1921 when he was spending the summer in Brittany. Prokofiev himself played the solo part at the premiere on 16 December 1921 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. The work did not gain immediate popularity and had to wait until 1922 to be confirmed in the 20th century canon, after Serge Koussevitzky conducted a lavishly praised performance in Paris. The first Soviet performance was on 22 March 1925, by Samuil Feinberg, with the Orchestra of the Theatre of the Revolution under Konstantin Saradzhev.

Prokofiev himself made the first recording of the Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1932 with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Piero Coppola. The recording was made at Abbey Road Studios in London and is the only recording that exists of Prokofiev performing one of his own piano concertos.
1st movement:

2nd movement
3rd movement

“In every fugitive vision I see worlds,
full of the changing play of rainbow hues…”
Konstantin Balmont

Sergey Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Visions Fugitives (fleeting visions) by Sergey Prokofiev is a set of pieces based on a poem written by Russian poet Konstantin Balmont. They were composed between 1915 and 1917 and premiered by Prokofiev on April 15, 1918 in Petrograd, Soviet Union.

The pieces, though far from atonal, contain dissonant harmonies similar in nature of music composed by Prokofiev’s contemporaries (Schoenberg and Scriabin), although still retaining highly original concepts in both tonality and rhythm.

Read more at Classical Archives

In 2007 the modern Jazz ensemble “Quartetski Does Prokofiev” released a CD which in a unique way captures the spontaneous spirit of these pieces. Listen to some free samples here!

Sarcasm, opus 17 no 4

The five Sarcasms (opus 17) are percussive pieces with considerable rhythmic motion.  They storm, rage and thunder throughout.

The Visions Fugitives, Sarcasms and Prokofiev’s own piano transcriptions of the March and Scherzo from his opera “The Love for Three Oranges” opus 33 have now been added to Piano Street’s sheet music library.

Igor Stravinsky characterized Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day. Prokofiev was also an excellent pianist, and often performed his own works.
Some of his solo piano music performances were recorded for HMV in Paris in 1935, and he was also soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra in the first recording of his third piano concerto, recorded in London on the HMV label in 1932. These recordings are now available on CD on the Pearl and Naxos labels.

In this encore from a recital at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest in 2005, a young Hungarian ”rising star” pianist and Steinway artist Adam Gyorgy displays his sensitive interpretation with a steady yet lively rhythmic sense of repetition, cultivated contrasts and lovely clarity of articulation.

A fine performance of this seldom heard Scherzo.

Born and raised in Foggia, Italy, Antonio Pompa-Baldi first came to the U.S. in 1999 to participate in the Cleveland International Piano Competition. He won First Prize and settled down there with his family. A top prize winner at the 1998 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris, Antonio Pompa-Baldi also won both a silver medal and the Award for the Best Performance of a New Work at the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Here is a live performance of Prokofiev´s Etude Op. 2 No. 1. A very ”muscular” work by Prokofiev, which requires a great deal of body weight, fixed positions as well as fluid octaves.
Pompa-Baldi brings forth great sound in spite of sitting very high on the piano bench, which does give him greater sideways flexibility. This is probably the reason for which he adjusts the height before he begins to play.

The Piano Sonatas number 1-4 have been added to our sheet music library.
http://www.pianostreet.com/search/searchcollection.php?id=187