Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall / Hong Kong / April 26, 2021 / Ernest Wan /
The 32-year-old, Berlin-based pianist Chiyan Wong came back to his hometown of Hong Kong amid the pandemic to play a solo recital of a J S Bach-inspired programme, one that grew better and better as it progressed.
It opened with Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op 35 No 1 (1837), which pays homage to Bach not only with its genre but also with its surprising inclusion of a chorale near the end. In Wong’s hands, the torrential prelude sounded suitably tumultuous and agitated, but the moody fugue, whose pages of accelerandi call for the highest level of control to achieve their cumulative and eventually cathartic effect, was let down by often lurching forward suddenly and impetuously. The pianist was perhaps so carried away by his passion that he skipped several bars of music in the middle.
The centrepiece of the programme was Bach’s Goldberg Variations edited by Ferruccio Busoni (1914), who omits as many as nine of the 30 variations in the original work, divides the remainder into groups and updates the keyboard writing for the modern piano. Wong adopted moderate tempi and played with much beauty of tone and contrapuntal clarity. For all its many tricky passages, the music never sounded virtuosic, but exuded a luminous serenity throughout; where it usually sounds dazzling and exciting, it now became shimmering and entrancing, especially in the later variations (20, 23, 26 and 28).
The best thing about the performance, however, was that it was presented at all, and not as a curiosity. Fidelity to “classical” musical texts having been a rarely questioned value for over half a century, Busoni’s unabashed makeover of the Goldberg Variations, had it not been so little known, would have been widely derided as a blasphemous anachronism. Yet Wong’s view that each score can evolve with each new performance is perfectly valid, and is borne out not just by his beautiful rendition of the Busoni text but by the numerous adjustments he made to it, especially in the final reprise of the theme, now so subdued as to suggest a distant echo.
Wong concluded the programme with Busoni’s celebrated 1893 arrangement of the chaconne from Bach’s D-minor partita for solo violin. Here he struck a balance between passion and control, and the music built up steadily towards its majestic close while showing no lack of contrast and drama along the way. A large-scale work such as this was scarcely needed for his excellent taste and execution to come through, though, as the brief encores amply demonstrated. In Busoni’s Turandots Frauengemach (1907) and one of Doming Lam’s Seven Popular Chinese Folk Songs (1962), which respectively use the melodies of Greensleeves and The School Boy, the frequent changes in register and texture were marvellously timed, to delightful, teasing effect. Yet such precise playing was so spontaneous as to sound like brilliant improvisations on familiar tunes, such as great composer-pianists of yore like Busoni himself would throw off.
旅居柏林的32歲鋼琴家王致仁於疫情期間回到家鄉香港舉辦巴赫作品獨奏音樂會，整場演奏隨著各首曲目的推進變得愈發精彩絕倫。
開場演奏曲目為菲力克斯·孟德爾遜的《E小調前奏曲與賦格》作品35，第一首(1837年)。此作品不僅以題材，更是在結尾處驚喜的融入了讚美詩來致敬巴赫。王氏指下傾瀉出暴雨急注般的序曲恰如其分的讓聽者感到動盪不安；賦格曲充滿情緒起伏，在漸速音的篇章要求演奏者以極強的控制力來慢慢抵達高潮最終徹底的釋放，而此次演繹往往切入的過於突然和急切令人有些失望。演奏者似乎已被激情所左右，以至於跳過了中間的幾個小結。
第二首作品為布梭尼編輯版本的巴赫《哥德堡變奏曲》（1914年）。此版本將巴赫原作中的30個變奏刪減掉9個之多，並將其餘分成幾個小組再為契合現代鋼琴而改寫。王氏的演奏亦採用現代節奏，配合以音調之美感以及對位旋律之清晰感來彈奏。至於眾多棘手的段落，他從未以高超技藝為渲染，取而代之的是通篇所流露出一種寧靜的光亮感；這些通常聽來令人炫目而興奮不已的段落，是次像是閃著微光而令人欣喜，在後幾段變奏20、23、26及28中尤為如此。
是此演出最美妙部分就在於它竟然能夠得以演出，而且不是被視為新奇罕有。忠於「古典」音樂文本是半個多世紀中鮮少被質疑的價值觀。布梭尼對哥德堡變奏曲所做的大膽改編，若非其比較小眾，很有可能被大家嘲笑為是不合時宜的對神明的褻瀆。然而王致仁完全認同每個樂譜都會伴隨著每一次新的演繹而共同昇華。就如是次演出不僅完美詮釋了布梭尼的改編版，更是加入了無數演奏者自己的創想。特別是在最後一次的主題重複中，他用極盡的克制讓人感受到一種遙遠的迴響。
最後一首曲目為布梭尼著名的1893年改編版巴赫D小調小提琴獨奏夏康舞曲。王氏的演奏在激情和克制中取得一種平衡，逐步的鋪陳直至最終雄偉壯麗的尾聲，期間充滿了跌宕起伏與戲劇張力。王氏高超的音樂鑒賞力和演奏水準幾乎無需通過這般大型的作品來證明，僅憑這一段小品就已足夠。布梭尼的《杜蘭朵的女人世界》（1907年）以及林樂培《民歌簡編七首》（1962年），分別選用了《綠袖子》和《讀書郎》的旋律，對於二者在音區和織體方面的頻繁轉變，王氏做到了精准契合，營造出歡快戲謔的效果，令人歎為觀止。然而此番精准的演繹聽上去又是如此的自然，放佛是基於這些熟悉曲調的一次才華橫溢的即興創作，就如同昔日偉大的鋼琴家作曲家布梭尼本人所做的一樣。