Thursday, October 31, 2024
Festsaal Fürstenhaus, University of Music Franz Liszt, Weimar
Guest Reviewer, Ateş Orga

Late on October the 31st a sixteen-year-old from China seized destiny. Zhonghua Wei. I haven’t heard
such a roof-raising account of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto in years. Golden Age blaze and
magic, new-world facility, fused into a single cosmic canvas. Powered, thespian projection,
delicacy and poetry, octaves caressed as much as thundered. Chords and bass lines
hewn out of marble, songs and fioritura spun fine as silk. Noble vistas, sweeping
panoramas, fairy candles, massive Roman columns supporting the edifice. No disrespect
to his peers, older and more experienced – Hamburg-based Chia-Yang Hsu from Taiwan
(second), Zagreb-based Viktoria Baskakova from Russia (third) – this was far from
‘competition’ expectation. Carefulness or safety, sucking dry the life and pulse of notes,
didn’t come into the reckoning. More a rare order of precision, discipline and glowingly
charged emotional maturity coupled with aristocratic body language. Controlled yet free.
Everything placed, nothing pushed, the touch elegant, the action refined, not a harsh
sound to be heard nor a crude affectation to be seen. Music, Wei says, is about “carrying life, history, and feelings”. Indefinably, that’s what we got. This was a high-octane, high-Romantic experience, the ‘real’ thing, conversant with Lisztian style and cadence, in natural harmony with the culture of eras past. On the rostrum, observant and supportive, Johannes Klumpp brought visceral drama and depth to proceedings. In so many ways how you weight and project the opening orchestral call-to-arms can be the making or breaking,the green or amber light, of this work. He judged it perfectly, energising a cinematically scaled tone-poem of a ride, galvanising his orchestra to up the stakes. Throaty strings, snarling brass, shaped section solos, incisive punctuation, driving crescendos. With applause breaking out even before the end of the performance, in front of a seasoned jury chaired by Michail Lifits comprising Michel Dalberto, Leslie Howard, Mariya Kim, Vivian Li, Boris Petrushansky and Lilya Zilberstein, Wei further took home the Audience Prize as well as a special award for the best interpretation of a Liszt song transcription. He obliged with the 1846 second version of Schubert’s Die Forelle following the results (contrastingly ‘Feux follets’ after the Concerto). Whatever emotions he must have been going through he kept to himself. But old greats, the aura of vanished times, kept crossing my mind. The drilled finger-work, the quietly positioned ornaments and whisperingly tossed-off finishes, the focussed training, compelled admiration. An artist in ascendance.