Pianist Yuja Wang “has built her reputation on breathtaking mastery of the standard repertory, like the chamber works she played last Wednesday with the violinist Leonidas Kavakos at Carnegie Hall,” writes Joshua Barone in Wednesday’s (2/13) New York Times. “She stopped by Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on Monday for something entirely different: a comedy show. One with music, of course…. She rapped! She sang and danced through a ‘West Side Story’ medley! She did one-legged, upside-down yoga on a piano bench! And along the way, she never lost an ounce of virtuosity. As part of Ms. Wang’s season-long Perspectives series at Carnegie, she was appearing with the musical comedy duo Igudesman & Joo—Aleksey Igudesman, violin, and Hyung-ki Joo, piano—in a program called ‘The Clone,’ an evening-length version of a sketch they posted on YouTube in 2017…. An entire bit at Zankel consisted of transposing Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla Turca’ from A minor to A major…. The punch line was in the unexpected change of character brought on by the different key…. In ‘The Clone,’ however … jokes … quickly became uncomfortable…. When the evening hewed more closely to truly musical comedy, it showed just how funny virtuosity … can be.”
February 14, 2019
