PASADENA STAR-NEWS
Pasadena, California – 2.21.08
A SMALL BUT MIGHTY YU WOWS CAL PHIL CROWD
By John Farrell, Correspondent
The biggest news at last Saturday's California Philharmonic concert at Ambassador Auditorium
was also the smallest.
Pasadena resident and piano prodigy Marc Yu, 9 years old (just: his birthday was this January)
joined Victor Vener and his orchestra Saturday to perform the first movement of Beethoven's
Piano Concerto No. 1. That is an astonishing feat in itself, but Yu's size made it all the more
surprising. With short, black helmet hair and Harry Potter glasses, dressed in a silk tail-coat suit,
Yu was only inches taller standing than Cal Phil Concertmaster Pavel Farkas sitting, and, at the
end of the performance, the bouquet of flowers he was handed seemed about to overwhelm
him.
Size is one thing, personality another, and Yu already has the aplomb, the gravitas and the
concentration of a practiced performer.
He is calm, serious, concentrated and, even sitting on a boosted piano bench, has the air of an
artist. As he demonstrated Saturday night, he also has all the technical skills of a virtuoso.
Beethoven wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 as a way of showing off his own prodigous talents as
a pianist, and the first movement alone is as long as a Mozart concerto, filled with pianistic
challenges that include a very long and very difficult cadenza, or solo, that last several minutes
and contains passages of fiery high-speed trills and cross-hand tricks. Yu was daunted by none
of these. He has all the dazzling speed necessary and if his hands are a little small for wide-
spread chords, it didn't show. True, he couldn't pound the piano with as much force as some of
his older fellow-artists, but give him a few years and an adolescent growth spurt, and that won't
be a problem.
His tempos were letter-perfect as well, perhaps too perfect. He might not be ready to challenge
composers with any rubato, but he was passionate and knew something about musical emotion.
Yu offered a bright and high-speed reading of Prokofiev's "Flight of the Bumblebee" as a crowd-
pleasing encore, and met with his audience at a reception after the concert, where he was
intent on playing tag with a friend, running through the crowd of adults as reminder of how
young he actually is.
Saturday's concert also was devoted to romance, and too-romantic music, two very different
things. To celebrate romance, and St. Valentine's Day just two days earlier, Vener chose
Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll," one of the composer's few purely orchestral works, one he wrote and
offered to his wife as a birthday present on her Christmas Eve birthday in 1867. Vener used a
version that starts with just the few strings and brass the original featured (it was premiered on
the staircase of the Wagner home) and then expands to use full strings.
It is full of glimpses of the opera to come ("Siegfried" premiered years later) and of the light and
air of a Rhineland forest, including bird calls and Siegfried's plaintive hunting-horn call. It was,
in this reading, balanced and rich and gentle, always restrained, full of power held back.
The scheduled evening ended with Prokofiev's "Classical Symphony," written in the last century
by the Russian composer but in the style of the smaller classical performing groups, with some
glimpses of modern musical ideas. It is Prokofiev's most popular work, a shimmering cheerful
valentine to an earlier musical world, and the orchestra played it with energy. Vener seemed to
hold the tempo back in the first movement but found speed in the two final movements,
especially the high-speed finale.
Feeling that he might have slighted the classical periods greatest composer, Mozart, Vener and
the orchestra offered as an encore that composer's bright overture to his opera "The Marriage
of Figaro," played with energy, enthusiasm and, in Vener's case, without a score.