Fort Worth — "I am really happy to be returning to Fort Worth," Joyce Yang bubbles in a recent phone interview. She will play a solo recital under the Cliburn Concerts banner on Tuesday, Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m. at Bass Performance Hall.
In fact, Yang is very happy about almost everything—and with good reason. The South Korean pianist was awarded the silver medal in 2005 at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition when she was only 19. Just for grins, she took two other medals that year: the Steven De Groote Memorial Award for the Best Performance of Chamber Music and the Beverley Taylor Smith Award for the Best Performance of a New Work. The combination of her effervescent personality and profound-before-her-age musicality also stole the hearts and souls of everyone: staff, audience, judges, other competitors, and even the ushers. Her career has been on an upward trajectory ever since.
She may be on the road to the glittering capitals of the world, but Texas is still a special place for her.
"As I travel around, it is amazing how many people I run into from the Dallas/Fort Worth area. They go to where the music happens, like Aspen for example," she says. "My favorite Texans are what I fondly call 'Great Southern Couples.' They all have a different character, but they share a love of the arts and a down-to-earth graciousness that is unique to the area. They are Texas to me. They just wouldn't fit in being from anywhere else."
She counts her 2005 Cliburn hosts, Sandra and Allan Howeth, as an outstanding example of the breed. "They adopted me, sort of, at the competition. When I was planning to return for this concert, the Cliburn people offered me a hotel, but I really wanted to stay at the Howeths, who told me that my room was ready and waiting. How could I pass that up for a hotel? I spend enough time in those already."
The host family is a vital part of the Cliburn experience. All of these performers are young and from somewhere far away. The competition, by its very nature, puts them under incredible pressure. "They were so concerned about me," said Yang. "I was losing weight and it was so nerve-racking. They really helped by just being there for me—and making a snack," she adds with her ever-present laugh.
Her concert career has kept her busy. Yang said that her time is split three ways. 45 percent of her engagements are orchestral appearances in concerti, 30 percet are solo recitals, and the rest are chamber music appearances. All three require a very different in approach from the young pianist.
"A concerto appearance, while still collaborative, is more of a soliloquy; an expression of your inner thoughts about the composer. A chamber music performance is a frank discussion about music with your colleagues. It is very renewing. I make music differently after a chamber ensemble performance," she says.
What, then, about a solo recital?
"Well, that is a hybrid," she said. "I bring the chamber experience to my solo playing. I become a quintet in my head. 'Ah,' I think, this is a cello line and here I need to get out of the way of the first violin.'"
But nothing can quite match the thrill of playing a concerto with a fine orchestra.
"This is what performers love to do," she says. "You are one and the orchestra is another one. The conductor becomes a tunnel in between us, or maybe a dam. It could either depend on something as insignificant as what was for lunch. Speaking of conductors, I played the Beethoven Second Piano Concerto recently with the Liszt Chamber Orchestra and they don't use a conductor at all. After a panic attack—I didn't realize this beforehand—I just played the piece and it was quite something."
What about the recital she will play in Fort Worth this week? As expected, Yang has thought it through very carefully. She doesn't just string pieces together but plans a musical journey for the audience with herself as tour guide.
"I start with Bach (Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903) but he sounds like the most modern composer on the program. If you thought that the late Viennese composers wrote in a chromatic style, this is where they learned it. It is a piece that amazes me every time I play it. So, of course that prepares us for Debussy (his Estampes)."
(Of course.)
"Debussy will sound very gratifying after the Bach, which is all black and white with sharp angles," she continues. "I feel that Estampes is more about whole tone scales and mix and matching of different sounds and backgrounds: far east gamelan sounds, Spanish strumming, and a French folk tune buried in the midst of it all. Debussy is still chromatic but is all shades of gray. So, that naturally leads to Lowell Liebermann (Gargoyles, Op. 29)."
(Naturally.)
"[Liebermann] brings both Debussy and Bach into the present day. Besides, I just love the title of 'Gargoyles': scary, evil, even a little sensual—but constantly creepy," she says without a trace of creepiness.
(Quite a whirlwind from 1720 Protestantism to 2005 creepy, and that is just in one-half of a program. But it all fits, somehow, when you hear her explain it.)
"The second half is every thing the first half isn't," she says with a sly gleefulness. "Schubert's Impromptu Op. 90, No. 3 in G Flat Major will bathe the audience is warmth and beauty. This will set up the surreal trip into Schumann's Fantasiestücke Op. 12. Schumann wrote these pieces with the duality of his own personality in mind."
The composer based this work on a series of bizarre novels, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, by E. T. A. Hoffman. Hoffman's two characters, the dreamy Florestan and the passionate Eusebius, vie for the upper hand in Schumann's composition.
"Schumann wrote this when he was my age," Yang says. "When I first looked at this music, I was intrigued by a movement that was just named 'Why'. Why what? Well, I had to find out. Now, it completely makes sense to me. Florestan may be reflecting on Eusebius and his excesses, but he can't finish the thought. In the end, both wedding and funeral bells ring out. Talk about a contrast of the beginning and the end. But Schumann falls out of the reality, leaves both events, and vanishes into his own imaginary world. It is a chord from another planet and you don't know where you will end up, even if you ever reach your final destination."
Well, Yang really does take us on a trip. Going from Bach's Baroque Weimar to another planet somewhere in an alternate universe, all in a single performance, we all just hang on for the ride. How different from the standard recital where the performer thinks that they should play some Bach to show clarity of technique, something lyric to show line and a big showpiece to dazzle. It may even be the same program in lesser hands, but without Yang's inner continuity, it is just a string of piano pieces.
It is little wonder why she has moved to the top of the classical music world in so short a time. 
