United States Tanglewood 2025 [2] – Various: Yuja Wang (piano), Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (conductor). Koussevitzky Music Shed, Lenox, 20.7.2025. (ES-S)
Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No.2 in G minor, Op.16
Encores:
Sibelius – from 13 Pieces for Piano, Op.76 No.2, ‘Etude’
Schubert/Liszt – ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, D.118
Horowitz – Variations on a Theme from Bizet’s Carmen
Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique, Op.14
Sunday afternoon’s concert at Tanglewood brought together two fevered visions of obsession and unraveling. Both Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.2 and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique channel a morbid theatricality, each embracing the grotesque and the unhinged in different registers: one as sardonic provocation, the other as opium-fueled hallucination. Written a century apart, these works mirror each other in their defiance of tradition and their exploration of emotional extremes – Prokofiev conjuring a fire-breathing enfant terrible, Berlioz a doomed Romantic gripped by love, jealousy and damnation.
Taken together, the works form a kind of diptych of musical possession. Prokofiev’s concerto begins almost innocently – a wistful melody hovering over quiet pizzicatos – before plunging into a mercurial sequence of grotesqueries, mechanical scherzos and volcanic cadenzas that seem to spiral ever deeper into madness. Berlioz’s narrative, more explicit in its programmatic arc, charts the descent of a lovesick artist into opium-induced hallucination, culminating in his execution and a ‘Witches’ Sabbath’. In both, the solo voice – whether Prokofiev’s embattled pianist or Berlioz’s idée fixe – is subjected to violent distortion, fragmented and ultimately absorbed into a larger, nightmarish design. Where Prokofiev’s drama unfolds through fractured momentum and irony, Berlioz pursues a feverish linearity, lurching from pastoral reverie to public execution to demonic ritual. But both scores share a taste for the uncanny: distorted waltzes, spectral processions and convulsive climaxes. Heard back-to-back, they offer not contrast but a dark kind of continuity, each tracing its own path through inner chaos toward something like damnation – or catharsis.
That same atmosphere of disturbed intensity permeated – willingly or not – the three encores Yuja Wang offered after the Prokofiev. Sibelius’s Etude, from the Op.76 set, came across less as a study in touch than a storm-blown toccata, its dark undercurrents brought to the surface by Wang’s clenched voicing and unrelenting pulse. In Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, the figure of Margarethe emerged less as Goethe’s innocent than as a woman already under the spell of Faustian damnation – her spinning wheel no longer a symbol of domestic longing but of compulsive entrapment. Wang’s right hand circled obsessively, whirring with a tension that verged on panic, while the melody wavered between reverie and possession. Finally, Horowitz’s Carmen Variations – virtuosic, devil-may-care and ever so slightly deranged – served as a coda of manic theatricality, its grinning flamboyance verging on nightmare.
When Yuja Wang took the stage, her glimmering attire, evoking the glamour of the Josephine Baker cabaret era, seemed to jolt – as her appearances on stage often do – the audience into heightened alertness. But from the first bars of Prokofiev’s concerto, any suggestion of playfulness gave way to something far more volatile. Wang established a mood of fragile order teetering on collapse. The opening melody, offered with restraint and veiled tone, carried a flicker of melancholy rather than warmth; hints of unrest were already crawling in the pedaling, in the slight inflections of tempo. As the music gathered force, her playing revealed an acute sensitivity to tension and release – surging forward not with impulsive bravura but with coiled deliberation. Her approach to the colossal first-movement cadenza was uncompromising: its dissonances unsmoothed, its architecture fully grasped. Wang plunged into the psychological maelstrom at its core, shaping it as a dramatic culmination rather than an interruption in the musical flux. There was a raw physicality in her attack but also clarity – a sense that even in its most manic extremes, poetry remained fully present.
The second movement – an unforgiving perpetuum mobile in octaves – became a study in focused precision. Playing at blistering speed, both hands locked in unison, Wang never sacrificed articulation for momentum; the effect was mechanical, impersonal, almost punitive. In the Intermezzo, she found something more lurid, more grotesque: her phrases teased and spat, colliding with the orchestra’s heavy-footed tread. The Finale pushed further toward fragmentation, alternating between propulsive fury and sudden, introspective collapse. A spare, folk-like melody emerged momentarily from the wreckage, played with eerie calm, before being swept away again in a blur of rhythmic fury. The final pages exploded with a kind of demonic glee – exultant but corrosive. If Wang was dazzling, it was not in spite of the music’s difficulty but precisely because of how fearlessly she inhabited its unstable world.
The first part of the concert was almost entirely about Yuja Wang – her presence, her choices, her grip on Prokofiev’s volatile score – but the second belonged, thrillingly, to the orchestra. Under Andris Nelsons’s direction, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra played with astonishing precision and expressive depth. This was more than a student performance polished to professional sheen: it was the culmination of an extensive process of training and a testament to Nelsons’s role as mentor. The conductor drew playing of remarkable clarity and urgency from the young musicians, guiding them through Berlioz’s phantasmagoria with a sure hand and an ear for extremes, from the noble idée fixe twisted beyond recognition to the ballroom shimmer giving way to ritual grotesquerie. Among the standout solos were the haunting pastoral exchange between the onstage English horn (Abigail Hope-Hull) and the outside-the-Shed oboe in ‘Scène aux champs’, and the snarling E-flat clarinet (Nickolas Hamblin) that set the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ ablaze with manic energy while thunder and a heavy downpour descended on Tanglewood.
If many in the audience came for Yuja Wang, they likely left convinced that the future of American orchestras is in remarkably capable hands.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Andris Nelsons conducts Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.2 with Yuja Wang © Hilary Scott