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Sylvia Jiang takes a bow at the Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition last year.

Sylvia Jiang adds to world-class online concert series

HOT’s music correspondent Brian Hick reviews the online concert given last week by Sylvia Jiang, the latest in Hastings International Piano’s An Evening In With… series.

This is proving to be a most rewarding series. The events may be brief, but the quality and intensity, the range and intimacy of the music-making is world-class.

On Friday, in the most recent concert, 2019 Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition prize-winner Sylvia Jiang brought us a wide range of emotional and musical delights.

She opened with Haydn’s Fantasia in C Major, with its sense of light and joy. Haydn lures us in with his sense of humour but suddenly plunges us into brief passages which could be straight out of late Beethoven.

She followed this with Liszt’s arrangement of his own setting of Petrarch’s Sonnet 104. The archly romantic writing, with its florid runs and showy technique, could hardly be further removed from Haydn’s elegance and it was clear Sylvia Jiang was thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

She concluded with Prokofiev’s Toccata, Op.11. This opens with deceptive simplicity, even if it is fiendishly fast, and then explodes with some of the most technically demanding writing one can imagine. It was exhilarating and uplifting, like jumping out of the sauna into a cold plunge pool just for the joy of coming out at the end.

While it is a pity we can’t experience these young musicians live, it is a real delight to be able to have them play for us in private concerts.

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Posted 13:16 Tuesday, Apr 28, 2020 In: Music & Sound

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