The Impossible Virtuosity of Yuja Wang

being mainly a guitar player go to Instagram and I follow a lot of guitar players on there and one thing I notice when I look at the posts as I'm scrolling through is that every one of them is people playing as fast as they can all you see just a lot of it's just the guitar not even a head it's just headless guitar players trying to rip as fast as they can things that they've practiced a million times but I want to see real virtuosos and this is no disrespect to all these amazing guitar players out there you gotta look to the piano and violin these are instruments that have had pedagogy or teaching strategies that go back centuries right these are where the virtuosos have had lifetimes worth of technique that's been defined and redefined and redefined and today we have these super virtuosos one of them I'm gonna play for you her name is yuja Wong she's a Chinese pianist who was born in 1987 she came to the United States and studied at the Curtis Institute and I've been following her for years and years anytime I that people think that there are these incredible guitar players that have chops I'll just play them this one piece and they see it and the camera can't even catch up to what she's doing it's a blur but this is a one minute and 50 second piece and it's based on rimsky-korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee It Was Written 1899 1900 or so and this is absolutely insane let's check it out [Applause] [Music] effortless [Music] [Applause] [Music] so relaxed [Music] can you see your hands [Music] now this is at the end of an entire program an entire concert and this is our Encore piece so she's played a full concert and then she attacks this with this kind of energy it's really really remarkable I should mention that this rimsky-korsakov fled to the Bumblebee Arrangement is by the great Hungarian pianist Georgie zifra who has an incredibly fascinating story and I will make a video on him in the future here's a video of zifra improvising this is from 1962. it's on YouTube foreign [Music] you can see where these ideas come from he wrote These insane piano Arrangements the interlocking octaves in this Flight of the Bumblebee are just about impossible to play and she's doing these things just effortlessly there's also another zipper arrangement of a Strauss piece called the Trish Trash Polka this is the ending of it this is usually playing and it has a stride piano because zipper it was also a jazz improviser and he incorporates a lot of jazz elements into this Arrangement he's basically playing the orchestral Arrangement that Strauss had but making it insane adding all these extra parts check out this stride piano so stride pianos basically you you have a an octave or a tenth in the left hand and then you go up to a chord and she's doing the so insanely fast check it out thank you [Music] this is just a little glimpse into you just playing you should definitely check her out on YouTube there are many many pieces of her she's not just this technical wizard she's an incredibly emotional player there's so many concertos and chamber music pieces and uh and solo piano pieces that are on YouTube or follow her on Instagram I'd love to have her in for an interview at some point hopefully that'll happen but this is a Pianist that you should know about if you don't already anybody that's into classical music knows usually Wong she's just uh she's a legend already at 35. that's all for now don't forget to hit the Subscribe button I appreciate you all watching and we'll see you soon

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 1,577,434

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, yuja wang, yuja wang flight of the bumblebee, yuja wang liszt, yuja wang turkish march, gyorgy cziffra, strauss, Piano, Virtuoso, Fast Piano, classical music, Classical Piano, Jazz, Jazz Piano, Stride Piano, Music History, Flight of the bumblebee, flight of the bumblebee piano, Piano Solo, Yuja Piano, yuja wang bow, cziffra flight of the bumblebee, cziffra piano

Id: Qri_DvU_9aM

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023