Young Artists of Tomorrow — Heard Today!
By
Lyn Bronson
Every year at Petit Trianon in San Jose,
Steinway Society the Bay Area presents a concert featuring a group of young
musicians who already at an early age have achieved remarkable distinction in
public performances and in competitive auditions, and this concert is
universally regarded as one of the most significant and satisfying events of the
Steinway Society’s concert season. The concert we heard on Sunday, May 13, was
no exception.
Launching
the program was 11-year-old Tiffany Chu,
a piano student of Daniel Cheng, and a winner of many honors, including most
recently the Menuhin-Dowling Young Musicians Competition in 2006 and an
honorable mention in the MTAC State Piano Solo Competition. At an earlier age,
she was a two-time winner in the Chinese Music Teachers Association of Northern
California. She has also participated in master classes by Ruth Slenczynska and
maestro of the China Philharmonic, Shi Shu Chen. Ms. Chu’s stage presence is
unsmiling, but also very self possessed and confident, and these qualities were
also evident in her playing. She demonstrated that she is very focused on stage
and totally in command from the first note to the last. On this occasion she
performed Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1. This piece requires
a beautifully controlled cantabile, and Ms. Chu proved more than capable of
spinning the lovely melodies with lots of magic from beginning to end. Her
climatic middle section was ferocious and her quietly composed ending was
eminently satisfying.
Daniel
Hsu,
at age 9 the youngest performer on the program and a pupil of Santa Clara
University Professor Hans Boepple, was the 2007 winner of the Menhuin-Dowling
Young Artist Competition. After winning the El Camino Youth Symphony Piano
Competition, he performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. In 2006 he was the
State Winner in his division of the Music Teachers’ Association of California
Concerto Competition playing Mozart’s G Major Concerto, K. 453. He has also
performed as soloist with the Fremont Symphony, the Golden Gate Philharmonic
Orchestra and the Castro Valley Chamber Orchestra. He performed on this occasion
Schumann’s Papillons, Op. 2, and
amazed us with his maturity, solid musicianship and brilliant technical command.
I found myself listening with my eyes closed and trying to convince myself that
what I was hearing was coming from a nine-year-old boy. It was uncanny!
Papillons is a work that contains
many small vignettes, and Daniel played each with its own appropriate style and
color. This was a truly artistic performance!
Yuma
Sung,
18, a brilliant jazz pianist, started off with an enthusiasm for classical music
at the age of six, but shifted to jazz when he was nine. In 2000 he won first
place in the San Jose Youth Jazz Competition. Since then he has received awards
in major jazz festivals including the Reno Jazz Festival Central, California
Jazz Festival and the San Jose Jazz Festival. In 2003 He was featured as the
“third generation” in the “Three Generation Concert” with Dave Brubeck and David
Benoit. Yuma composed his first jazz piece when he was 10 years old and has won
“Best Arranger” and Best Soloist” awards from Downbeat Magazine. During his
appearance Sunday evening, Yuma performed three pieces, two of which were
original works and the third was his own arrangement of the great standard, “All
the Things You Are.” His performing style is at times smooth and classically
oriented, and at other times full of spiky accents, interesting chord
progressions and lots of impressive technical skill. His is an art that will
grow and develop in unimaginable ways over the years.
Chloe
Pang,
15, is a pupil of Mack McCray at the San Francisco Conservatory Preparatory
Division. Last fall, she made her Carnegie Hall debut in “From the Top” LIVE:
from Carnegie Hall,” which was featured
in national release on PBS. Chloe
has appeared as soloist in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Oakland Civic
Orchestra and in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with the El Camino Youth
Symphony, with whom she will tour in Russia, Estonia and Finland this summer.
Her professional debut at age 8 with the California Symphony brought high
critical acclaim. Recorded at age 12, her debut CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations
was critically acclaimed by International
Piano Magazine. Her performance
Sunday evening of two Scarlatti Sonatas was big and bold, but with wonderful
moments of expressive subtlety in which she demonstrated a fine feeling for
Scarlatti’s style. Her concluding piece was the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 11.
She created nice moments of magic in the slower sections and blew us away in the
faster concluding section, which whizzed by at the speed of light. Incidentally,
Chloe was beautifully dressed for the occasion and demonstrated a lovely smiling
stage presence that won you over before she even played one note.
Ending
the evening’s concert was a longer group of several works performed by
Chetan Tierra, a current pupil of
Antonio Pompa-Baldi at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and a former pupil of
Hans Boepple. A laureate in over twenty piano competitions, Chetan made an
acclaimed debut at Weil Recital Hall in New York City in November 2006. About
his opening work, the Ballade No. 2 in B Minor by Liszt, there is divided
opinion. Some feel it is an empty bombastic work, while others feel it is an
important masterpiece ranking in stature right up there with Liszt’s B minor
Sonata. Making a strong case for the latter opinion, Chetan’s performance was
totally convincing and totally masterful. The way he controlled the dynamics of
the swirling chromatic scales in the base, starting every so quietly and
mysteriously and building to successive climaxes in a long, long crescendo was
as dramatic as it was musically satisfying. The mystical soft interludes that
foreshadowed Wagner’s Tristan were magical.
Chatan’s second work on his program was Franck’s
Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and it
received a titanic performance, full of drama, gorgeous sound and intelligent
planning from beginning to end. That this is a difficult work to memorize was
evidenced by a few memory slips, but artist that he is, Chetan was always able
to climb back on board and carry on as though nothing had happened. Chetan
closed his program with a lovely performance of Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata. Again,
lots of gorgeous sound and masterful playing culminated in a truly impressive
performance. In response to enthusiastic acclaim, Chetan rewarded the audience
with an encore — a lovely performance of Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
