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 Who
is Wendy Fang Chen? Why do
we care?, December 10, 2004
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.
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