June 12, 2007
by Marvin J. Ward
Classical Voice of North Carolina
One of the features this recording offers, and therefore recommends it de facto to the listener, is an excursion into a facsimile of Chopin's own sound world. Few, if any of the many other recordings of these works available on the market, offer this kind of sonic perspective. Although this particular piano was built over a half-century after the composer's death (in 1849), it is a product of the same firm whose instruments he preferred. Indeed, the Op. 28 Préludes (1836-39) were dedicated to the firm's owner at the time, Camille Pleyel, son of its founder Ignaz, as the liner note (alas slightly marred by a typo: a "non" for "none") points out. The final two works are played in their chronological (1834 and 1841) rather than catalogue order. The Pleyel was, incidentally, the first piano to use a metal frame.
The tempi and rhythms of Chang's performance of some of the individual pieces differ, sometimes markedly, from those we are accustomed to hearing. Chang has made the study and performance of Chopin's works a particular focus, and has clearly thought carefully about them and strayed from the standard path quite deliberately. This gives a fresh perspective that is often revealing and rewarding. One of the most noticeable for this listener on first hearing is the so-called "Raindrop" Prélude, Op. 28/15, where Chang deemphasizes the incessant and monotonous repetitiveness that overpowers so many other interpretations.
Hers are generally less emotive and more cerebral, less flamboyant or dramatic and more finely nuanced, less dominated by exaggerated dynamic contrasts between ppp and fff and more intimate, and in the end far more musical than the "heart on the sleeve" interpretations of many. Although startling at first for its departures from standard ones, her performance is ultimately persuasive: with each listening I became more and more convinced of its absolute appropriateness for the music. Michael Kennedy, in his Oxford Dictionary of Music, rev. ed. ©1994, p. 170, says: "Although Chopin's pf. mus. is beset with romantic stories and nicknames, he himself insisted on its existence as absolute mus., hence the rather severe titles which refer only to mus. forms and are never picturesque, as in Schumann and Liszt. His own playing was both powerful and rhythmically subtle, with astonishing evenness of touch." This recording strikes me as a fine emulation of that.
Upon listening to Martha Argerich's 1977 recording in the DG Chopin Edition for comparison, I became immediately convinced as well of the greater suitability of this instrument for the music, even if it is not contemporary to it, suitability that Chang discusses eloquently in her very brief and personal liner note. The sound has a deeper, more resonant tone and a remarkable clarity together with a light ring and a slight shimmer, which a more bright and brilliant modern piano does not possess, characteristics that are especially pleasing.
I recently heard Chang in a live recital on the Frederick Collection spring series in Ashburnham, MA, where she played the complete études, Op. 10 (12, 1829-32) and Op. 25 (12, 1832-36) on a Conrad Graf (Vienna) piano from 1828, which has its original leather hammer pads and most of its original strings. Chopin began the composition of his Op. 10 while living in Vienna and playing on Grafs. This was, therefore, an even more authentic excursion into the composer's sound world than this recording, one in which the instrument seemed even more perfectly suited. The performance was stunning and brought the audience immediately to its feet. Chang played two encores, the Op. 28/20 so-called "Funeral March" Prelude and the Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. post. (1830).
At the time this recording was made, the 1907 Pleyel, whose case, decorated with a hand-painted landscape that also uses gold paint, can be seen in the photo beneath the CD holder, was available for purchase from Klavierhaus, 211 W. 58th Street, New York, NY 10019, 202-245-4535, www.klavierhaus.com. It does not currently appear on the website, however.
Very highly recommended. Every Chopin lover should add this CD to her/his collection!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
by EILEEN SIEGEL and MICHAEL J. FRESSOLA
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE STAFF WRITERS
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - Nothing can make a pianist's fingers ache more than listening to a virtuoso colleague dispatch one of Chopin's Etudes.
Most of these finger-busting studies are difficult taken one at a time. But imagine doing all 24 (from Op. 10 and 25) in one afternoon. Pianist Hsia-Jung Chang did just that at the Music at St. Alban's concert series Sunday in the Eltingville church.
Most "studies" are not really suitable concert fare, because they are generally uninteresting, meant solely to build up the pianist's fingers or emphasize a particular aspect of piano technique.
However, Chopin's etudes are another story. Considered by many to be the most "pianistic" of composers, Chopin, who composed most of these etudes when he was only 20, extended the limits of piano playing by creating a whole new palette of textures and techniques.
On each etude, Ms. Chang managed to make the technique seem effortless, while coaxing out the particular personality of each selection. In some cases, this is extremely difficult, as in Opus 25 No. 6, the famous "study in thirds" which takes a mechanical exercise and turns it into a work of art.
Similarly, No. 11, commonly called the "Winter Wind" because it has been compared to a storm's wintry blasts, requires not only power and endurance, but passion and lyricism.
There are times in these works where one can forget they are studies at all, as in Op. 10 No. 3, in E major. Chopin told one of his pupils that "he had never in his life written another such melody." Ms. Chang did justice to this lovely little gem.
After all those thirds, sixths, octaves, scales, runs, "revolutions," "winter winds," "butterflies," and poetry, she still had the energy to give a lovely rendition of a Schubert Impromptu as an encore.
Symphony Review
Orchestra, guest pianist shine like gold
Spokane Symphony Orchestra Sunday afternoon at The Met
Travis Rivers, Correspondent
January 9, 2006
The Spokane Symphony Orchestra celebrated Vienna's golden age on Sunday afternoon at The Met with fine performances of a dramatic overture by Beethoven, one of Mozart's masterful piano concertos and a symphony that can be described only as perky.
Morikiho Nakahara, the orchestra's associate conductor, led the performance.
Beethoven's popular overture to his otherwise little-known ballet "The Creatures of Prometheus" opened the program. From the startling sequence of abrupt chords that begin the work, Nakahara and the orchestra showed the large Met audience a work that sometimes looks backward to the balanced elegance of the classical age, then suddenly turns toward the grip of emotionality in the romantic.
Pianist Hsia-Jung Chang was soloist in Mozart's Concerto in C Major (K. 467), an astonishing masterpiece that happens to be a favorite of mine. Chang grew up in Spokane, and though she lives in New York, she frequently has performed solo recitals here. This was her first concert with the Spokane Symphony since 1984 when she was a Young Artist winner of the Spokane Festival, and a welcome return it proved to be.
Mozart fills the first movement and finale of this concerto with sparkling figuration designed specifically for his own fleet fingers. Chang's playing combined a fluent ease in Mozart's most difficult passages with an intense concentration that gave the concerto real vitality. Mozart left no written cadenzas for this work, so Chang improvised her own, which were explorations of the full range of the piano keyboard and witty comments on Mozart's themes.
One great Mozart scholar described the concerto's slow movement as "a dream andante" - a movement that seems to exist in a world of throbbing accompaniment, muted colors and melodies with wide intervals filled with longing. There is a kind of beautiful ache in the music that both Chang and Nakahara captured in Sunday's performance.
The finale featured quick exchanges between soloist and orchestra that resembled a series of volleys in a hard-fought game of tennis. Only funnier.
The 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth is just weeks away, and Sunday's performance was a splendid beginning to a year of celebration.
In his spoken program notes, Nakahara pointed out that on Sunday evening, Austrian television was to announce the result of DNA studies to determine whether the skull purported to be Mozart's really is his. Sad to report, the results were inconclusive. But the results of Mozart's genius definitely are authentic.
Schubert's Symphony No. 5 is something of a miracle for a lad of 19. It manages to evoke infectious energy even without the trumpets and drums that had long become standard symphonic instruments. Sunday's performance captured the youthful spirit of the work's fast movements and the lyricism of its andante.
If some in the audience thought it amiss that the orchestra failed to acknowledge Haydn as a star in Vienna's golden age, it was clear that Haydn, the musical jokester, was winking away at us from the pages of Schubert's finale.
The concert will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at The Met.
Hsia-Jung Chang, piano
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
February 20,1999
A piano recital of heartwarming distinction was offered by Hsia-Jung Chang.
[...]
Two fascinating compositions featured in Ms. Chang's program. Wu Kui (1983) by Zhou Long evoked, for this fascinated listener, elements of Bartok ( his Allegro Barbaro and his 1926 Sonata), something of Ginastera, and a soupçon of Messiaen: "Wu Kui is a folk dance of north-east China. Wearing masks of five animals, the tiger, leopard, bear and roe deer, the dancers, usually hunters themselves, express their joy of work and life. The piano solo piece, presenting the original style using animated patterns rhythmically in the end parts and illusive gestures in the middle, won a prize at a Chinese National Piano Music Competition in 1983, Beijing." At one point, the pianist strums the strings with her hand.
The other piece, Fractured Skies (1998) by Yuzuru Sadashige was heard in a world premiere and was commissioned by Ms, Chang for this occasion. According to the program note, "the audience of this premiere is invited to compose this section of the program notes." The pianist displayed some miraculously deft, rapid trills. Ms. Chang's laser clarity and focus put me in mind of Peter Serkin's pianism at its best - high praise, indeed.
Just as memorable in its own way was the gifted young artist's interpretation of the potentially elusive and problematic Drei Klavierstücke, D. 946 of Schubert. It took only a few bars of the first stück in E-flat Minor to draw the listener's rapt attention with its deft acuity and finely honed impetuosity. She played it with exemplary rhythmic control, a never-wavering forward direction, and a quivering poetry. Ms. Chang perceptively savored the B major Trio section (which incidentally may have influenced Chopin in the analogous B major section of his Fantasy in F minor, Op. 49). And, wisely, she respected Schubert's wishes to omit a second, redundant Trio. She, likewise, moved the barcarolle-like Allegretto second piece along with delightful flow; and romped vigorously through the heady syncopations of the culminating Allegro third piece (which is actually far more Bohemian in style than echt-Wienerische).
If anything, Ms. Chang's integral performance of the four Chopin Ballades was even more mesmerizing in its unwavering clarity of structure and emotional concentration. All sorts of felicities were realized to the hilt: To cite just a few important details, she potently brought forth the clashing harmonic suspension in the opening measures of No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 23 and likewise savored the bass note buildups leading to both of the same work's big, sonorous climaxes. I was also fascinated by Ms, Chang's mobile, direct and uncluttered treatment of the lilting opening melody in Ballade No.2 in F Major, Op. 38 (or, as many justifiably insist, A Minor; the tonality of its ending). And so it went with the other two works of the quadumverate., No.3 in A flat, Op. 47 and No.4 in F minor, Op. 52, which cohered exquisitely without in any way brusquely ignoring lyrical potential. If any quibble must be voiced, Ms, Chang's sharply linear sonority might have profited from greater ringing weight in one or two of the big, expansive moments - but in most aspects, these were thrillingly revelatory and inspired rethinkings of four of Chopin's supreme masterpieces. Such clear-headedness and selfless honesty are exciting to encounter - all the more so since Chopin is so frequently mauled by "Tradition."
A brisk, unusually impetuous account of the Nocturne in F flat, Op. 9 No. 2 ended the afternoon appropriately and made this listener glad to have made the acquaintance of so interesting and formidably accomplished a musical personality. Hsia-Jung Chang is a distinctive and important new voice in the annals of pianism: I'll be watching her with keen anticipation.
- Harris Goldsmith
Hsia-Jung Chang [rebuilt 1907 Pleyel piano]
Mandala 02. Duration: 42:06
CD available at www.cdbaby.com/chang2
The Préludes of Chopin are not an easy task to interpret. It has been done time and again, but a real fine rendition is scarce. This is why the new recording by young Taiwanese pianist Hsia-Jung Chang surprises. This is my first encounter with this lady, but I don't think it's the last.
I received this CD in the mail from New York (where the pianist lives) during a very difficult time in my life, during a period of restless and desolate separation from someone I really loved deeply, and had just met a few months earlier during a hike in the Lapland wilderness, but who, after a few months, was departing on a much longer hike, that would take her around the globe, via Tibet and Vietnam to an arborist job in New Zealand.
I found some rest and consolation in this music by Chopin, so sensitively and caressingly played by young Hsia-Jung Chang. I could not sleep, but I played this CD on my CD-player in the bedroom, on repeat, through the night, and felt some peace from it, from the beauty of tone and touch and composition, from the seamless flow of soaring emotions and shivers of light that Hsia-Jung Chang's playing emits.
There is a certain temporal phase shift in the atmosphere that the sound of the piano creates, too, because it is an old Pleyel piano from 1907, rebuilt and brought back from the decades. Chopin had, in his time, in fact dedicated these Préludes to piano maker Camille Pleyel!
On Hsia-Jung Chang's homepage you can listen to a New York radio interview with her, where she, among other things, explains how she one day walked in to a music store on 58th Street in Manhattan and found a restored Pleyel piano there. She sat down to play, and this is the very same piano that you can hear on these recordings of the Préludes.
The temporal ambiguity of course has to do with the nuances of this old instrument, but not only that. I think it may well have to do also with Hsia-Jung Chang's touch, her own personal atmosphere of artistry and musical honesty. I compare her more readily to yesterday's pianists, in a good sense, like Moriz Rosentahl, Ignaz Friedman or even Emil von Sauer, than to contemporary players. This is said in favor of Hsia-Jung Chang, and not in the least against her. In her playing of today she has been able to retain some of the best feelings and notions of the early 20th century pianism. She is the only one that I've heard so far who has had the courage and artistic values to enable her to do this.
Even the recording techniques in themselves amplify this impression of temporal uncertainty, i.e., do we hear a new recording or a very old one? That is because the piano isn't closely miked, but rather heard at a certain distance, the way early piano recordings often were done.
I recorded, myself, a young Estonian pianist - Dainis Valpeteris - in a large drawing room of a Swedish mansion in 2000, and managed to catch much the same atmosphere on an old Förster piano. Some of the feeling of age may therefore also stem from the recording space itself.
However it all came about, Hsia-Jung Chang's CD is unique to me, not only in that it has brought me some peace of mind and some consolation in a time of heartbreak, but also because I can stack it on the shelf alongside Josef Hoffman and Ignaz Friedman with a conviction of it's natural domiciliary rights up there!
It goes without saying that nothing is flawed in the pianist's technique, far from it. Instead I should stress that she executes these vulnerable pieces of Chopin with the ease of breathing; it's amazing and elating.
Anyone who can write a piece like Prélude 15 in D-flat Major knows about love, knows about sorrow and knows about reconciliation. Anyone who can play this masterwork like Hsia-Jung Chang has lived that love, suffered that sorrow - and gained that reconciliation.
One day when my heart has healed and I can truly rest again, I will listen to this CD with a deep feeling of gratitude in my heart, for it has been such a good companion in times of hardship.
- Ingvar Loco NordinOriginal text: Sonoloco [ Sweden-based ]
Chopin: Impromptus, Ballades, Berceuse
"...she frees Chopin from his reputation as a quintessentially Polish composer. Deliberately picking out the Spanish influences in the third Ballade, written after Chopin and his lover George Sand returned form Majorca, Chang evokes castanet rhythms and Mediterranean folk influences. Her literary interpretations too are fresh, breaking with tradition on the second Ballades, the F Major, Op. 38 which Robert Schumann had attributed to a poem but Chang sees instead as a lyric tale of a fisher maiden lost at sea. Appropriately, the album closes with the Berceuse, a dusky lullaby with variations on the nightingale's bedding-down song."
- Sheri Boggs
Chopin Complete Préludes
"All Frédéric Chopin Préludes are played immaculately on this CD by the brilliant young pianist Hsia-Jung Chang. They have been recorded in digital stereo on a rebuilt 1907 Pleyel piano, a make of instrument the composer is believed to have preferred for his music. Hsia-Jung Chang performs the works with great delicacy and refinement, allowing a wide spectrum of colour and moods to emerge in a way that appears effortless. Hsia-Jung Chang is currently based in New York City and has performed throughout the USA as well as in Scandinavia and Asia. She is active as soloist and chamber musician in addition to being a guest lecturer at the Manhattan School of Music and elsewhere. Her equally impressive recording of the complete Chopin Impromptus, Ballades, Berceuse is also available. For more information, visit the website at www.hsiajungchang.com."
- New Classics [ new-classics.co.uk ]
It is an entertaining and wide-ranging discussion, with varied music selections by Chang and others.
- Good Morning
- Weather
- Happy B-day
- Chopin A-flat Impromptu
- Chopin's health
- F Ballade intro
- F Ballade
- CDbaby
- Narration to F Ballade
- HJ background
- Cucurucucu Paloma
- Ho Lan
- Ikaw
- Bahn Tsun Hong
- Home on the Range
- Pleyel project
- f-sharp Prelude Steinway
- f-sharp Prelude Pleyel
- Early vs. Modern instruments
- What documentary?
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