Pianist Haochen Zhang
Flying fingers, connected to a probing mind
February 13, 2010Pianist Haochen Zhang came equipped with world-beating technique, high intelligence and -- at his best -- deep musical feeling when he gave a solo recital Feb. 11 in the Empire Theater for Arts San Antonio.
The Shanghai-born Zhang tied with Nobuyuki Tsujii of Japan for the gold medal in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last June, a few days after he turned 19.
The core of his program in San Antonio came from the meaty core of the Romantic repertoire -- Johannes Brahms’s Four Pieces for Piano, Op. 119; Frédéric Chopin’s melancholy Ballade No. 4; and Robert Schumann’s epic Fantasy in C. Zhang opened with Mozart’s Sonata in C, K. 330, and closed with Igor Stravinsky’s Three Movements from “Petrouchka.”
Schumann and Stravinsky, paired after intermission, got the most memorable performances. In the Schumann Fantasy -- essentially a novelistic three-movement sonata -- Zhang fully conveyed the roiling, uncontainable passions of the music. In the middle slow movement, Zhang’s delicate, gossamer touch was the soul of dreaminess. This was full-blooded Romanticism of the highest order, but a disciplined Romanticism, attentive to details, line and structure.
Stravinsky’s intention, in recomposing excerpts from his “Petrouchka” orchestral score for piano solo, was to provide a showpiece for the great Arthur Rubinstein. Zhang met the work’s gargantuan technical challenges with astonishing facility, and he delivered the whole with go-for-broke spiritedness and sparkling, vivid colors.
In both Chopin and Brahms, Zhang’s care with contrapuntal or polyphonic details and the qualities of sound itself sometimes took precedence over sense of line, but the performances were so beautiful, probing and personal, on their own terms, that the lapse was easily forgivable. The last of the Brahms pieces, the heroic Rhapsody in E-flat, got a particularly thoughtful, richly shaded reading.
Zhang’s stylish Mozart was remarkable for a delicate, almost weightless touch -- every note a little pearl -- and for a slightly clipped diction that suited the music.
The venue was not altogether congenial to Zhang’s recital. there was no acoustical shell on the Empire stage. From a seat no more than 20 feet from Zhang on house left, the piano sounded muffled and distant. At a seat farther back, on house right, the sound was much bigger. Alas, post-intermission cleanup clatter from the bar shattered the mood of the Schumann Fantasy, and street noise often leaked through the theater’s doors.
Mike
Greenberg
