The Well-Tempered Ear

How did pianist Yuja Wang’s heart respond to playing Rachmaninoff?

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By Jacob Stockinger

You might recall that in January of 2023, superstar Chinese pianist Yuja Wang (below) played a marathon Rachmaninoff concert in New York City’s Carnegie Hall.

It lasted 2½ hours and featured all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos plus his Rhapsody in a Theme of Paganini. It received rave reviews as well as standing ovations and sold-out houses.

Wang — famous for her ease and assurance in playing technically challenging compositions —  performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra under conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Deutsche Grammophon recorded the same program Wang did in Los Angeles — but over two consecutive weekends rather than all at once — with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel.

In the YouTube video at the bottom you can hear the sublime slow movement from the Piano Concerto No. 2 from the series of LA performances. If The Ear is not mistaken, in closeups of her hands on the keyboard you can see what looks like a heart monitor on her wrist.

Time and length wasn’t the only remarkable thing about the concert.

Always a fashion plate, Wang wore a different stand-out dress for each piece, as you can see from the photo below:

In addition, she wore a heart monitor — as did the conductor, several players and members of the audience — to track her heart rate while she was playing.

Which concerto do you think proved the most challenging — at least to her heart?

Perhaps the Rach 3, which has been called the “Mt. Everest of piano concertos” and was even made into the 1996 movie “Shine” with its super-virtuosic difficulties at the heart of the story about mental health.

The results are in a story from Classic FM radio station in the UK.  Here is a link:

https://www.classicfm.com/artists/yuja-wang/heart-rate-rachmaninov-marathon

The heart rate is an interesting angle at a time when so many people — both audiences and performers — wear wellness monitors and keep track of their own heart rates.

The administrators and performers probably thought showing the heart rate in real time on a jumbo screen during the performance would be too distracting.

But The Ear recalls seeing a live performance years ago by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who wore a heart monitor during one of his dances done to a solo cello suite by Bach.

It proved irresistible as a new hi tech take on classical music.