I have long been fascinated by the idea of genius, and I often speak to my son about it. It is a term I apply sparingly. Of course, Beethoven and Bach were geniuses; Shakespeare and Tolstoy; Leonardo and Michelangelo. But the other day as we were driving home from school, my son asked me who I thought the living geniuses are. Now, I can't really speak about math or the sciences, but I had to say that offhand I could think of only two: Hillary Hahn and Yuja Wang. For those who may not know, Hillary Hahn is a violinist, and Yuja Wang is a pianist.
Whenever I hear them perform I am struck by several things: their depth, their emotive power, the poetry of their playing, their technical skill, and their extraordinary memories; both seem to have absorbed an enormous amount of repertoire, which they can produce on a moment's notice, elegantly and effortlessly, as if they had been preparing for weeks.
Their personalities are quite different. Hillary Hahn appears as quite the more serious artist of the two. Her playing is always precise and profound, invoking all the centuries of violin art which have preceded her. I have written here before that to hear her play solo Bach is among the finest artistic experiences one can have. And she is a great champion of modern music, often luring us in with promises of Bach in order to introduce us to music written in the past year or two. The last time I saw her perform, she played a dozen new pieces, among them one written for her just a month before. And she played them all faultlessly from memory.
Then came the Bach, and I just closed my eyes and relished, for it included my absolutely favorite piece of music, the great Chaconne from the D minor Partita. It is by far the longest and most complex of all the movements in the solo sonatas and partitas, and is, I think, the piece by which any violinist must ultimately be judged. Her performance was perfect, as her playing always is perfect, rich with insight and nuance, tasteful, intelligent, intricately precise and deep, and carried off with impeccable intonation and technique. In her hands, the Chaconne truly comes alive in all its variety, and expressiveness. She brings to it, I think, as much skill as anyone who has ever attempted it, and derives from it all the spiritual insight with which Bach infused it.
I have seen her perform the Sibelius Concerto, also one of my favorite pieces of music, and she does so with all the inspired attention to detail that she brings to Bach. Yet in its sprawling, icy virtuosity, the Sibelius allows her to expose aspects of her personality which the Bach does not. Sibelius is a romantic, of course, but his romanticism is always constrained by his Nordic heritage, and this suits her exquisitely, for her character and her technique, while capable of the great romantic gestures of the piece, are always grounded in a striving for perfection of expression. I had the good fortune to meet Hillary Hahn briefly, and I must say that she struck me as being every bit as serious, focused, and utterly unaffected as I had imagined her to be.
Yuja Wang, on the other hand, is all about the celebration of youth and the joy of being alive. She is so delightful, so effervescent, yet when she sits at the piano to play, she is transformed. The first time I saw her I had no idea who she was, but her program was rich and varied and I thought, how bad can she be? I was overwhelmed. She played a stunning variety of pieces with equal skill, virtuosity, and verve, and the culmination was the one I had really come to see, La Valse, by Ravel. This must be one of the most daunting tasks a pianist can undertake, and I almost literately held my breath as she started. She was magnificent: powerful, poetic, technically brilliant, and inspired. I had never heard the piece performed so well.
Last night, unable, as usual, to sleep, I watched a video of Yuja Wang playing the Liszt Sonata in B minor; a monster in one continuous movement, 30 minutes long, varied, intricate, yet with an overarching intellectual integrity that must be sustained through all its dramatic fireworks and lyrical interludes. And again, it was breathtaking. But I must admit that I enjoyed watching her face as much as listening to her playing. That she is completely immersed in the music, transcendentally concentrated, is clear from her expressions, which are not, like my other favorite pianist Mitsuko Uchida, vast and melodramatic, but, rather, they are contained, internal, and wonderfully subtle. And I realized as I watched and listened that the essence of her playing is not, as I had thought before, poetry and power, it is spirituality.
I have often remarked to my son, when Mozart comes on the radio in the car, that it is difficult to believe that such genius could have been incarnated in a single human being. Yet last night, I saw it incarnated in Yuja Wang. Her playing, and her experience of playing, are a spiritual exercise, every bit as much as those of the great mystics of our tradition, yet much more moving in that she makes them so gracefully and generously accessible.
Two women, both very young, both supremely talented, and both, in my understanding of the idea of genius, living examples of its rare and glistening incarnation.
