The 2023 Bach Festival concluded on Saturday with the traditional Goldberg Variations, entrusted to the pianist of Korean origin based in Munich William Youn, a new sold-out concert, but which leaves a very mixed impression.
William Youn’s trademark is being a “piano poet”. The Bechstein brand ambassador even brought in a remarkable instrument from his favorite brand which also accompanies him in his recordings. Because Youn, whom we hardly know here, recorded a complete Sonatas of Mozart for Oehms, before being hired by Sony to engrave those of Schubert. But we can’t say that Oehms CDs flood the market, so Sony records CDs that it doesn’t distribute here.
In Montreal, on Saturday evening, at the church adjoining the Bell Centre, which caused a delay in the start of the concert, on a match night, William Youn, in fact and above all, played Variations 13 and 25 (the two variations the slowest) Goldberg Variations by Bach. He played them as slow movements of Sonatas of Mozart in Christian Blackshaw style, that is to say micro-detailed, but in a starched and ecstatic version. A short pause duly arranged just before warned the viewer: watch out, there is something coming! This attitude endorsed a vision not in arch (or in groups of two variations and a canon), but in vignettes, of this score.
Not sharp
But what are we saying here about “vision”? We discuss vision or interpretation when the basics are there. However, on many occasions we had the impression that Youn was “doing a Blechacz” on us on Saturday. We adapt here this concept of “doing a Panenka” during penalty shots in soccer, recalling that the Polish pianist Rafał Blechacz had found nothing better than to come and play the famous Emperor Concerto with the OSM and Nagano by not mastering the score (it later turned out, in his case, that he had never played it and had found nothing better than to do his trial run with us ).
To adapt the Blechacz experience to the Youn case on Saturday, the embarrassing impression of having an artist who came to read his score while not yet having it completely in his fingers in the most twisted and complex passages seized us on multiple occasions. The digital shortcuts and muddles began very audibly at Variation 5. Variation 8 was very painful, to use a non-swine word that is not too annoying. A bit like a Tour de France rider let loose on each climb, we quickly understood that Youn was going to “interpret” the slow variations and that we were going to pray that he gets through the most complex ones. Curiously in the final third, he was more successful in the technical challenges, starting with the tortuous Variation 20. But the discomfort returned in 23e.
We can also remember that Zhu Xiao-Mei’s letter was not necessarily perfect, but the framework was quite different: we didn’t care about a note slipping from time to time due to the intensity and the relevance of the interpretive content. Because the “vignetting” of Goldberg isn’t the only problem of the evening. Youn’s approach also raises the question of the legitimacy of covers when nothing is done to this extent. A reprise in this music is generally ornamented. If Youn does not adorn, he does not enrich the speech. So why is he dilating it?
In short, the quality of William Youn, a fine and elegant pianist, and his skills in terms of touch or his propensity to create poetic atmospheres, for example, are absolutely not in question. But Saturday, whether in this state of preparation or this state of form, it was neither the work, nor the day, nor the place.