Yuja Wang brings house down as she stands in for piano legend Martha Argerich

FILLING the giant shoes of piano legend Martha Argerich is nothing new for Yuja Wang, but I doubt that many people were left disappointed.

Pianist Yuja Wang is standing for Martha Argerich who has cancelled her Sydney Symphony concerts.

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FILLING the giant shoes of Argentinian piano legend Martha Argerich is nothing new for 30-year-old US-based Chinese star Yuja Wang, but I doubt that many people in the audience were left disappointed by this last-minute substitution after she performed Beethoven’s first concerto and two barnstorming encores.

In fact the audience clearly wanted even more after she rattled off Arcadi Volodov’s variations on Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca — think Dave Brubeck meets Liszt — and Russian legend Vladimir Horowitz’s Carmen Variations on themes from Bizet’s opera.

And what they got in the second half was not more pianistic pyrotechnics but two wonderfully vivid orchestral showstoppers under the baton of the remarkable 80-year-old Swiss maestro Charles Dutoit, which were worth the ticket price alone.

Factor in the Australian premiere of a long-lost piece by a young Igor Stravinsky and this was a concert to remember indeed.

RESTRAINT

Wang showed considerable poetic restraint in the Beethoven concerto — the work that Argerich was to have played before she cancelled her Australian debut tour through ill health.

Possessed of a formidable technique with dazzling legato and dexterity, the young virtuoso is also a mature and sensitive interpreter, alive to the structure, nuances and inner voices of the work.

Charles Dutoit and SSO principal cello Catherine Hewgill at Sydney Opera House. Picture: Brianne Makin

Dutoit set a slow and measured tempo for the middle movement. There was a brief discussion before he started as if to say “you’re young and brilliant but let’s not rush this”. Perhaps here the spirit of Argerich could be felt.

Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, composed as a memorial to his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was performed once in 1909 and was the lost to the world until the score was discovered again in 2015.

Valery Giergiev conducted a second performance late last year and since then conductors have been rushing to get it included in concert programs.

COLOURS

It’s an interesting work which predates The Firebird, Stravinsky’s first big hit, by a few months and is full of tremolo strings and big Russian minor chords as you would expect for a funeral piece.

But there are plenty of orchestral colours, presaging his great ballet works, and it gives a deep and surprising bow to Wagner, whom Stravinsky famously hated, especially in the writing for brass. At this stage of his career the young Russian was obviously under the spell of Götterdämmerung which he’d seen with Rimsky-Korsakov shortly before his teacher died.

Dutoit conducted with all the energy, swash and buckle of a 50-year-old

The second half was all vibrancy and dance, with Dutoit moulding and cajoling his willing troops through Manuel de Falla’s two ballet suites The Three-Cornered Hat, bringing out the biting Spanish satire as the Governor fails spectacularly in his attempts to seduce the Miller’s Wife.

The evening ended with a swirl of building and dying crescendo in an exhilarating performance of Ravel’s La Valse, Dutoit conducting with all the energy, swash and buckle of a 50-year-old.

The concert is repeated on Friday, June 30, and Saturday, July 1, both at 8pm.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Yuja Wang

● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

● WHEN: Thursday, June 29