I wrote recently that NJPAC, the New Jersey Symphony's home, is the second-loveliest concert hall in the New York area. I forgot to mention, as I remembered tonight, that the walk from Newark Penn Station to NJPAC takes you along the second-ugliest stretch of road in the New York area, next to whatever Godforsaken route appears in the Sopranos credits. You can, in fact, ride little buses to and fro, in order to avoid the feeling that you're about to be hauled into a van and taken for a long drive in the woods. But the hellish walk somehow adds to the pleasure of the place itself. The program, under the direction of the striking young Estonian conductor Anu Tali, consisted of Niels Gade's Hamlet Overture, Grieg's Piano Concerto, and Sibelius' Fifth. I'll save the Sibelius for an upcoming New Yorker column and comment briefly on the Grieg. Yuja Wang was the soloist; I knew her from Leon Fleisher's Carnegie Hall workshops, which I wrote about last year. Then, I was gripped by her playing, though I felt she hadn't fully grasped Schubert's language. She has certainly mastered Grieg's. She gets a huge sound out of the piano, which isn't surprising from a well-traveled young prodigy. What's more impressive is that she plays in big paragraphs, shows a powerful grasp of structure, brings delicate fantasy to lyric passages. She is only seventeen years old, which amazes me most of all; I assumed she was in her twenties when I heard her last year. She is a remarkable talent with miles of room to grow. She plays NJPAC again on Saturday.
