REVIEW: Sevenars Music Festival, "Junwen Liang"

The Academy, Worthington, MA

www.sevenars.org

August 4, 2024

by Michael J. Moran

Junwen Liang

In advance publicity for this concert, Sevenars called 29-year-old Chinese pianist Junwen Liang their 2024 “young artist to watch,” a prophecy that was richly fulfilled in his varied program of challenging repertoire by five diverse composers.

Perhaps his boldest stroke was starting with the program’s centerpiece, Franz Schubert’s 35-minute Sonata in C minor, D. 958, as the entire first half of the concert. This is the darkest of the composer’s last three piano sonatas, all written months before his death at age 31 in 1828, and now considered among his greatest masterpieces. Liang launched with swagger into a dramatic opening “Allegro;” his “Adagio” was calm but suffused with the sorrow that haunts much of Schubert’s music; the “Menuetto” was somber and graceful; the “Allegro” finale, relentless.    

The program’s second half began with sensitive readings of Claude Debussy’s 1907 “Images,” Book 2. A shimmering “Cloches a travers les feuilles” (“Bells through the leaves”) was exquisitely shaped; a probing “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut” (“And the moon descends on the temple that was”) evoked the sound Debussy loved of the Indonesian gamelan; a nimble “Poissons d’or” (“Golden fish”) sparkled playfully. Liang extended the impressionistic mood with a rhapsodic account of Chinese-Australian composer Wanghua Chu’s 2003 “Jasmine Flower Fantasia,” inspired by a Chinese folk tune. 

 

Shifting into a more virtuosic gear, Liang next offered a joyfully swinging take on Ukrainian-Australian composer Catherine Likhuta’s jazzlike 2001 “Rondo,” which recalled the infectious jazz-based style of her fellow Ukrainian Nikolai Kapustin. But it was Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 which brought out the full-blown musical showman in Liang. As he unerringly found his groove through the piece’s contrasting moods and abrupt tempo changes, it was hard to imagine that even the legendary Liszt could have wowed his audiences with greater technical finesse on his European concert tours.

Nor could Liszt have been more dazzling than Liang was in performing as his encore what has been called Frederic Chopin’s most difficult work, his Etude, Op. 25, No. 6. With an engaging stage presence, helpful spoken introductions to the music, and confident programming skills, Junwen Liang is ready for a major career.

Sevenars continues on Sundays at 4 pm through August 18th.