We Get to Judge the Judges

Goethe-Institut Thailand Auditorium.  Bangkok.  October 22, 2013.  Every other year for the past 14 years, The German Cultural Center sponsors a piano competition for young Thai piano students,  which provides students as young as eight-years of age, a wonderful opportunity to prepare a few classical pieces for public performance and to receive comments from a panel of international judges.  The judges, in turn, give a piano recital for the participants and the general public. 

The most interesting part of this year’s judges’ recital program was the performance by German pianist and academic Rolf-Dieter Arens, of two piano works of Wagner’s music.  The first was a musical curiosity, an early work (opus 4) by Richard Wagner himself, a piano sonata in the traditional sonata-allegro form.  I didn’t know that Wagner had ever written anything for the piano, and this work is not known for good reason: it is quite ordinary and bears no relation to Wagner’s revolutionary operas, although there

(Photo l to r)  Rolf-Dieter Arens, Woohyung Yang, Lambis Vassiliadis

are a few vague hints of one or two of his later leitmotifs.  Wagner did well to abandon writing chamber music.  There followed, one of Franz Liszt’s opera transcriptions or paraphrases, this one being a paraphrase of Wagner’s early opera, Rienzi.  It had all the bombast and excesses one associates with much of Liszt’s music, but Arens, whom I’ve heard many times during his frequent visits to Thailand and whose solid performances I like, did a nice job in not overplaying Liszt’s elaborate elaboration of Wager’s orchestral music.  It was nice to hear these two new pieces.

Greek pianist Lambis Vassiliadis, another competition judge, tried to play Beethoven’s Sonata No. 17, nicknamed (but not by Beethoven) “The Tempest.”  Vassiliadis’ performance was marred by excessive rubato, frequent and unwarranted tempo changes, phrasing which he alone thinks appropriate, heavy use of the pedal, and a percussive piano touch which borders on banging.  The 25 minutes the sonata took to play were painful.

Korean pianist Woohyung Yang, is an accomplished and sensitive pianist, who took us through Beethoven’s Opus 110, considered one of Western music’s towering achievements, in a thoroughly musical way, but without having much to say about the work.  Her very good technique was not quite good enough to get her through the fiendishly difficult fugue, but her musicianship made up for whatever her fluency lacked.  All in all, a pleasant, if unremarkable, performance.