Search - Grieg, Schumann :: Forever Gold: Grieg & Schumann - Piano Concertos

Who is Wendy Fang Chen? Why do we care?

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 12/10/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To start off, if you care about music, you should discover how much fine music-making this CD contains. Wendy Fang Chen is a Taiwanese Chinese lady born in Brooklyn (in 1971). She studied at the Juilliard School in New York, earning both her bachelors and masters degrees. Now she teaches on faculty at Juilliard. Beginning to get the picture? She is also a woman composer of some reputation, albeit not much outside the circles of other New York City women composers, which may very well be our loss. This CD gives us the Grieg and Schumann piano concertos, plus one by Chen herself, called Pas de Deux.



The first cliche you have to overcome is the old saw about a woman pianist not having enough tonal heft to carry off the big gestures of the Romantic piano literature. Clara Schumann was, after all, the dedicatee of the Schumann; and there is nothing dainty about it, though there is much that as Tovey reminded us is recklessly pretty. Wendy Chen manages all the tone you could want in these performances, although she tempers the virtuoso barnstorming with more poetry than fist-fighting young Horowitz-wannabes may bother to bring to the keyboard.



In the Grieg concerto she reveals wit and poetry, as well as dramatic sweep and the crytalline cold chills of the moment that still remind most American ears of pictures of Norwegian fjords. Another strength of this performance is that Ms. Chen plays straight with basic tempos, as well as with phrasing. She can vary and inflect a musical phrase without having to slow down so much that you think the train is breaking down or running out of gas before it gets to the next station. She can also manage to expressively phrase those characteristic Grieg scampering runs that take a player from one end of the keyboard to the other, storming right along with the orchestra in climactic statements.



There is great directness and clarity of musical purpose in these readings, and not an ounce of overblown rhetoric: you can't pinch an inch from the way that Ms. Chen delivers either the Grieg or the Schumann. She is, oddly enough given the falsely lightweight reputations that women pianists stereotypically acquire, all lean muscle and warm heart.



By the middle of the Schumann concerto, especially given its unerring poise, which somehow simultaneously carries along with it more sweep and color than not, you may find yourself thinking of great women pianists of the past. Chen's tone is bigger than, say, Alicia de Larrocha (who is by no means a dainty player). On the large end of Chen's range, you almost think that Gina Bachauer or Guiomar Novaes is with us again. Is that the ghost of Teresa Carreno I see leaning on the upper balconies in rapt attention? On the pianissimo end of that range, however, you hear a belled center to the softest tones that might have you reaching for memories of sopranos like Amelita Galli-Curci, instead of piano players.



If you have heard so many second-rate performances of the Grieg that you now hear this work as a vehicle for piano competitions, rather than as a piano concerto, Ms. Chen will chasten your memory in all the right directions. If you have heard the Schumann pulled every which way in the names of hyper-Romantic interpretation, the Ms. Chen will return you to sanity and strength. Ms. Chen demonstrates just why these two piano concertos have been such staples of the concert literature that they could fall upon bad times and become war horses.



Leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Thomas Sanderling is with Ms. Chen every living, breathing step of the way. He is a perfect partner; and there is not a hackneyed moment in either his or the orchestra's manner. Wind and brass accents appear like sparkles in sunlight, then fade ever so appropriately back into the overall orchestral fabric. Strings dance and sing along, but always along ... partnering the piano just as they should. Aspiring conductors who care about being good accompanists in the concerto literatures must get this disc as a lesson, a very good lesson, in point.



The recording quality is wide-range, carefully balanced at precise mid-distance in the hall, although the skimpy budget CD liner notes don't bother to say where we are. As with the better sounding 16-bit CD's, you can simply hear everything in this recording as if you were sitting in a very good live concert venue, like, say Boston Symphony Hall.



Then what can we say about Ms. Chen's own piano concerto? Well, she works in a modern tonal idiom. Her balancing of piano and orchestra is astute and nothing obscures the points she is making. Her work is quite condensed; the whole concerto lasts barely over ten minutes. The contrasts between Ms. Chen's music and the other late Romantic piano concertos on this disc are a bit jarring. I suspect that Ms. Chen's concerto would be better served in a full disc of her own music, if that were possible. She is fairly prolific, and surely deserves wider exposure as a composer. Her writing for the piano, as you might expect from her abilities as a pianist, is entirely apt and worthy of her instrument. She also knows how to write for the orchestra, so far as one can judge from a ten minute piano concerto. Again, we should be hearing more from the rest of Ms. Chen's oervre.



So, if you feel like a bit of discovery, this disc will let you begin to get acquainted with a living woman composer who just may know her craft better than her low-level neighborhood name recognition suggests. If you ache for fine performances of the Grieg and the Schumann concertos, orchestra included; then this little budget gem of a CD is just the ticket. Five stars, highly recommended."

Delightfully uplifting

mikel | Medford, NY United States | 05/05/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you have the means then you should avail yourself of any opportunity to see this artist perform. You will be pleasantly surprised."