United States Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and R. Schumann: Joyce Yang (piano). San Francisco Performances, Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, 1.4.2025. (HS)
Beethoven – Piano Sonata No.3 in E-flat major, Op.31
Rachmaninoff – Six Preludes (Op.32, No.1, 5, 10, 12, 13; Op.24, No.4)
R. Schumann – Kreisleriana, Op.16
Joyce Yang knows how to connect with an audience. In the American pianist’s recital, presented by San Francisco Performances in Herbst Theater, she grabbed a microphone and talked about what the pieces on the ambitious program meant to her. Introducing a collection of six preludes from Rachmaninoff’s twenty-four, for example, she noted how the composer’s piano works required so much technique to master that she had to keep reminding herself to pay attention to the vast contrasts in emotion in the music.
That thought actually describes her entire program. She began it with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.3 in E-flat major, one of the composer’s most playful sonatas, a surprising contrast with the torment he must have been feeling as he wrote it and realized he was going deaf. She chose the Rachmaninoff preludes that followed, mostly from the Op.32 collection of thirteen (which completed his set that addresses every major and minor key), to underline the range of emotions the composer wrote into these preludes.
Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana seesaws between lyric beauty and angry intensity, and the piece befuddled his contemporaries. Yang sees the music reflecting Schumann’s striking mood swings (at least partially attributable to mental issues that came to light later in the composer’s life). This work lies in Yang’s wheelhouse: her remarks admitted that it was her favorite Schumann piece to play, and then she demonstrated why. She used all of the sudden changes in mood, constructed by tempo shifts, jarring harmonic turns and musical complexity, to conjure vivid musical scenes. Each one confounded expectation like an athlete dodging a defender.
Schumann’s mercurial emotional swings came through without extra emphasis, just enough to unsettle a listener and delight us with the surprises. Yang seemed to recognize intuitively that the piece wasn’t a tone poem with a narrative but a reflection of the composer’s own unhinged emotions distilled into music.
Written when Schumann was 27 years old, the work could be seen as an outlet for his frustration that his long courtship of Clara Wieck was being blocked by her father. The couple would not marry for two more years, after which he said in a letter to Clara that he wrote the piece for her. In the end, he dedicated it to Chopin. Although it is not quite Chopin-esque, it teems with explosions of pianistic extravagance, which Yang delivered with appreciable clarity.
The first half began with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.3. Yang’s playing only approximated the transparency of her work with Schumann, but it focused nicely on the sonata’s amiability, a rare trait in Beethoven’s larger-scale piano pieces.
The emotional impacts of the various Rachmaninoff preludes came through in a performance that emphasized the broad strokes more than the details. The exception was the G major, which fluttered delicately and entrancingly. Played next to last in her sequence, it provided a deftly placed breather between the complexity of the grandly stated D-major (the only one not from Op.32) and the expansive D-flat that rose to a majestic climax.
Harvey Steiman