By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on Sep 25, 2008, at 2:30 PM Updated on 9/25 at 2:30 PM
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Pianist Jie Yuan, who will be performing in recital Friday night as part of the Evenings at the Bernsen concert series, first played in Tulsa in 2006, when he won first prize in the 2006 Crescendo Music Awards, presented by the Rotary Club of Tulsa.
“Winning the Crescendo award really helped boost my confidence as a player,” he said during a conversation the following year, right before he joined the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra to perform the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Rachmaninoff.
That's putting it mildly. Yuan won three awards at the Seattle International Piano Competition, held last weekend. He won first prize in the colleagiate division (Yuan is working on a degree at Texas Christian University), along with the "Teacher's Favorite" award and "Best Performance of a work by Robert Schumann."
Earlier this summer, Yuan was chosen to be one of 24 contestants in the Busoni International Piano competition in Italy, one of the world's most prestigious musical contests.
I said of Yuan when he played with TSO that he played the Rachmaninoff with "a ferocious energy and -- in the first movement, especially -- a dry, almost brittle tone.
"It emphasized the almost disassociated, antagonistic quality of the music in the first movement -- the piano working out its own tormented thoughts, the orchestra countering with calm and reasoned statements. And just when you thought the two entities would never see eye to eye, there came a few unison notes between piano and orchestra -- a glimmer of hope and accord that would be developed in the rest of the concerto.
Yuan's playing is rambunctious, seeming at times to be more about achieving emotional effect than precision. Nothing wrong with that -- it always helps to have a player passionately involved with the music. And while he excelled at this concerto's more robust passages, his playing in the slow second movement was marked by great feeling and restraint."
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