Yuja Wang brings dazzling virtuosity and sensitive artistry to the Gilmore Festival

In 2006, a 19-year-old Yuja Wang was granted a Gilmore Young Artist Award. Fast forward nearly two decades and she has skyrocketed to the highest echelons of pianists, with her recital at this year’s Gilmore Festival a stop on a brief US tour — and two nights ahead of a sold-out appearance at Carnegie Hall. Held at Chenery Auditorium, the Gilmore’s largest venue, one could feel an almost electric air of anticipation before she took the stage.

Her program was as massive and demanding as it gets, with a first half devoted to the rarefied, mystical soundworlds of Messiaen, Debussy and Scriabin. Two selections from Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus opened. Le baiser de l'enfant Jésus saw meditative beginnings in glacial stillness, splashed with piquant colors. It built to a ferocious urgency, with the piano’s upper register piercing like shards of glass. Regard de l'esprit de joie burst forth with manic, percussive energy. Ecstatic in its expression, the feeling was mirrored by the smile on Wang’s face, undaunted by the staggering technical demands.

In an unannounced change to the program order, Debussy’s L'isle joyeuse followed to continue the thread of joy. The piece opened in hazy impressionism, though not at the detriment of its clarity, achieved in part through the pianist’s detailed, nuanced pedaling. The sweeping arpeggios, however, were given without pedal, cutting across the keyboard with razor-sharp precision.

Even for Scriabin, the Eighth Sonata is an unusually demanding and labyrinthine work. Wang plunged into the mysterious world without hesitation, making sense of its dizzying complexities and mercurial moods – it seemed the whole spectrum of emotion could be traversed in the space of a few bars. Extensive trills, a device all three of these composers used to intoxicating effect, added a further layer of delirious detail. Wang’s liquid hands could do anything the composer asked, no matter how pianistically awkward, before dissipating into silence.

The second half was devoted to all four of Chopin’s mighty Ballades, each occupying a world unto itself. Wang presented them in a slightly modified order (2, 3, 1, 4), yielding a more end-weighted dramatic arc. The gentle and sweetly unassuming beginnings of the Second were abruptly upended by an oceanic tempest, building to a ferocious coda, though the opening material had the final word in a postscript, ringing as softly tolling bells. Chopin was at his sunniest in the Third, and Wang played the warm and affable material with a certain elegance, and a climax the radiated pure joy.

The First was firmly in the tragic realm, however, though lyrical, passionate interludes and a breakneck scherzando offered contrast, but the fuoco coda was utterly devastating. Wang had a velvety touch in the final and perhaps greatest ballade, drawing out a melody of melancholy, and it too burgeoned to a shattering, singularly tragic conclusion.

No fewer than five encores followed, in what was a jaw-dropping display of virtuosity. The pianist didn’t show the slightest bit of fatigue – seemingly she could have played all night! Spiky octaves gave a Shostakovich prelude and fugue much charisma, and the virtuosic filigree that decorated Cziffra’s elaborate transcription of The Blue Danube was as much a marvel for the eyes as the ears. The wistful melody of Glinka’s The Lark served as a more introspective moment ahead of Samuil Feinberg’s stunningly dazzling transcription of the Scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, and finally, the Danzón no. 2 by Arturo Márquez gave a sultry and stylish close to a memorable evening.