STRANGER THINGS: THERE ARE THREE CHINESE PIANISTS NAMED WU YIFAN

 

STRANGER THINGS:

THERE ARE THREE CHINESE PIANISTS 

NAMED WU YIFAN

Watching piano competitions on YouTube reveals some strange things. I was tuning into the livestream of the 7th Hong Kong International Piano Competition, when I noticed that a Chinese pianist named Wu Yifan had pulled out due to a hand injury. He had recently just won the 65th Busoni International Piano Competition at Bolzano, Italy and had been engaged for a series of concerts from November. Incidentally, he had also won 1st prize at the Singapore International Piano Competition in 2023 as an 18-year-old. I know, I was there.

Then I turned to the 19th Chopin International Piano Competition at Warsaw, Poland to find that Wu Yifan was one of the participants there. What a sneaky thing to do, feigning injury to skip out on one competition in order to take part in a more prestigious competition. Or so that was what I thought until I noticed that the pianist had changed his appearance. Gone was the afro, and in came someone with short straight hair. According to the Chopin Competition website, he was born on 11 November 2008, which makes him a month short of 17-years-old. He was also the 2nd prizewinner at the Van Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition in 2023. So who is who?

So I checked their photos and YouTube videos, and found out they were clearly two different Chinese pianists but possessing the same name, Wu Yifan.

Just to complicate matters further, there is a third pianist also named Wu Yifan from Flushing, New York (below). He was 17-years-old in 2011 when he was featured on the concert series From The Top. Clearly, this was someone older and no longer in the piano competition circuit.

I can only wish these three talented young pianists named Wu Yifan or Yifan Wu well for their musical careers. Just spare a thought for those concert promoters wishing to engage them. They are spoilt for choice and also probably utterly confused.

However, the three Wu Yifans should never be mistaken for the Chinese-Canadian singer Kris Wu Yifan, a convicted rapist and sex offender, who is presently doing time. Who knows, maybe he plays the piano too?

Update:

Another Wi Yifan has turned up, this time at the Violin Junior category of Singapore's National Piano & Violin Competition 2025. Wonders never cease.

SEONG-JIN CHO IN RECITAL / Review

SEONG-JIN CHO IN RECITAL

Esplanade Concert Hall

Monday (9 June 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 June 2025 with the title "Chopin competition winner dazzles with mastery of tonal shades".

The young South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho became an instant celebrity when he was awarded first prize at the 2015 Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. Not to be typecast as merely a Frederic Chopin interpreter, his most recent piano recital here contained not a single note of the Polish pianist-composer’s music.

Photo: AlvieAlive

The first half of his programme was built on a theme of nature and countryside. Out stepped a most severe and serious-looking presence, one who ambled slowly and took short unsmiling bows, but it all changed the moment he touched the keys.

Photo: AlvieAlive

The pristine and crystalline sonority he coaxed from Franz Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este (The Fountains of Villa d’Este) from the Third Book of Years of Pilgrimage had to be experienced to be believed. Seldom has the waterworks of Tivoli sounded this pearly or luminescent, from mere trickles to full gushing spouts, with the spiritual qualities of its inspiration fully realised.

Photo: AlvieAlive

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata No.15 in D major (Op.28), also known as his Pastoral Sonata, came next. Cho’s account opted for the most clean-cut and sanitary approach possible, with not a single leaf or feather out of place. The drones of the hurdy-gurdy and country bagpipes were heard, coming not from some weather-worn peasant but a high-flown, spiffily-attired aristocrat.

Photo: AlvieAlive

If rusticity or earthiness were wanting in Beethoven, all restrains broke free with Bela Bartok’s Out of Doors, the Hungarian nationalist’s 1926 suite in five movements. Bare-knuckled fists and hammers rained on its highly percussive opening movement, With Drums and Pipes. Bartok at his noisiest then segued into a silky smooth Barcarolla and the quirkily rhythmic Musettes, where folk instruments where simulated.

Photo: AlvieAlive

The Night’s Music probed the mysteries of the dark, with secret sounds of insects, birds and assorted creepy crawlies, and here Cho’s mastery of tonal shades and silences falling in between was supreme. The Chase, which breathlessly closed the half, was taken just too quickly, with many fine details obscured in a blur of terminal velocity.

Photo: AlvieAlive

Cho’s second half was devoted to a single work, Johannes Brahms’ early and monumental Sonata No.3 in F minor (Op.5). This was the young German master at his brashest and most blustery. Yet behind its torrents of massive chords and aggressive octaves lay a tender and vulnerable soft centre. By superbly marshalling its stark contrasts, Cho found a way to the heart of this music.

Photo: AlvieAlive

The opening movement’s bold statements were balanced by the slow movement’s sheer lyricism, with the latter’s theme returning in the short and mysterious fourth movement, titled Ruckblick or “backward gaze”. In between was a vigorous and almost vulgar waltz, one impossible to dance to. The busy finale could have gone off on a tangent, but Cho kept the fires stoking, making for an impressively heroic close.

Photo: AlvieAlive

Responding to overwhelming applause, his encore of Mozart’s Variations on Ah vous dirai-je maman (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star) was crisply turned and simply delightful. The accolades drew from Cho a smidgen of a smile, a wave of the hand, and then he was gone.

Seong-Jin Cho in Recital

was presented by Credia Arts & Media

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, March 2016)

EARL WILD

Complete RCA Album Collection

Sony Classical 88875030742 (5 CDs) / *****

The long-lived Earl Wild (1915-2010) carved a patchy concert career that awkwardly straddled between the dying embers of “Golden Age” piano-playing and an era of objectivity and an obeisant approach to musical scores. 

The epithet of “the last Romantic” applied to him as well as contemporaries Jorge Bolet and Shura Cherkassky, major artists whose careers were sidelined for decades before being finally recognised in their old age for uniqueness and individuality. Wild recorded for many labels but never received a sustained contract, and this box-set of RCA Victor recordings dating mostly between 1959 and 1973 showed what might have been.

All five discs house virtuoso works for piano and orchestra. The piano concertos by Xaver Scharwenka (No.1 in B flat minor) and Ignace Paderewski (A minor) must simply not be missed for their over-the-top romanticism and luscious melodies which Wild simply revelled in. His takes from 1969-1970 are still considered the gold standard for this under-performed repertoire, as are his 1959-1961 recordings of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, Piano Concerto In F and I Got Rhythm Variations with the Boston Pops Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler. 

One will also not find a more outlandish account of Liszt's Hungarian Fantasy. Here he adds his own flourishes and embellishments, which one suspects the composer would have heartily encouraged. Wild was an outsized maverick talent who will be sadly missed.

GREAT CHOPIN PIANISTS

Deutsche Grammophon 479 5404 (11 CDs) 

****1/2

This is a collaboration between the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw and the German yellow label to reissue performances of Chopin's piano music by past winners of the Chopin International Piano Competition. The 18 selected pianists date from the first competition in 1927, won by the Russian Lev Oborin, all the way to 2010, when another Russian Yulianna Avdeeva was crowned. 

In between are the famous likes of Maurizio Pollini (1960), Martha Argerich (1965), Garrick Ohlsson (1970) and Krystian Zimerman (1975), together with Dang Thai Son (1980), Stanislav Bunin (1985), Li Yundi (2000) and Rafal Blechacz (2005) among others.

Here the Deutsche Grammophon archive is mined and handily rehashed, which makes for an excellent introduction to first-time listeners of Chopin’s concertos, Études, Préludes, Ballades, Scherzos, Polonaises and Sonatas. The notes make no mention whatsoever that no first prize was awarded in 1990 and 1995, so performances by second-placed artists (Kevin Kenner, Philippe Giusiano and the late Alexei Sultanov, by no means second-rate pianists) are also included. 

Here is a true feast of piano's favourite composer, which include rare historical performances from Alexander Uninsky (1932), Yakov Zak (1937), Bella Davidovich and Halina Czerny-Stefanska (Joint 1st Prize, 1949) and Adam Harasiewicz (1955). Only a few performances were recorded from the competition's actual rounds, but that should not be a deterrent.