Pianist Dang goes off in new direction
For the first time in his many visits to Japan, Vietnamese pianist Dang Thai Son's tour, which runs through Oct. 20, includes no Chopin work.
"It's a kind of new decision for me, a change of my image a bit, although it's not that I won't play Chopin any more," said Dang, who became the first Asian winner in the prestigious International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1980.
The program opens with Litany by Toru Takemitsu.
"I find this piece very special," Dang said of Litany. "They have two movements. The first movement is very obvious, we can listen to an old Japanese song. It was written in memory of his friend (Arts administrator Michael Vyner), so the feeling is very dark. It reminds me of noh theater--nothing spectacular or dynamic, but every movement, every gesture is slow and so meaningful. He changes color and intonation and makes it very sophisticated.
"The second movement was composed about 30 years after the first movement, and I see the evolution of his (Takemitsu's) creativity. The language, the imagination and the color are so different. The first movement is an emotion for the dead, and the second movement depicts a kind of a life after death," Dang said.
The piece takes about 10 minutes, which was another deciding factor for the pianist to include it in the program.
"The audience of modern music is very particular. People going to normal classical music concerts find it not easy to listen to a program heavy with modern music," he said.
The rest of the program is made up of piano masterpieces from the Romantic and Impressionist eras: six pieces from Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, Two Legends by Liszt and Debussy's 12 Preludes, Book II.
Born in 1957 to a poet father and pianist mother, Dang started taking piano lessons at age 4 from his mother, who at the time was teaching at the Hanoi Conservatory. The Vietnam War caused the family extreme hardships, but, with the help of Russian pianist Izaak Katz, who recognized the young Dang's rare gift, Dang was able to go and study at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 1977. Three years later, he won in the Chopin competition, which takes place every five years.
Since then, Dang has been hailed as the best pianist to come from his part of the world.
"If people know that I come from Southeast Asia, it makes me very proud, but I don't want to make it any excuse, you see. So I try not to look at difficulties behind me and all the background that was not very easy," he said.
He was the only non-Polish pianist who was invited to play at a special concert in 1999 in Warsaw that commemorated the 150th anniversary of Chopin's death.
For more than 10 years now, Dang has been living in Montreal, where his 84-year-old mother also lives. Yet his busy tour and teaching schedule keeps him out of the city about two-thirds of the year.
"Always touring is not good because you need time to recover and make a new repertory for the next season," he said. "Usually I take two months per year to do so. For concert activities, I mainly spend time in both Canada and France. In Paris, there are more concerts, and the artistic life there is really exciting. But Canada offers me a big space and a good condition for living. When I close my door quietly and practice piano, I prefer Montreal. It's a kind of balance."
Before moving to Montreal, Dang lived in Japan from 1987 to 1991, teaching at Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo.
"My life in general is very much tied with Japan. I have been touring here for 22 years," he said.
He also goes back to Vietnam every year to hold concerts and give master classes at conservatories in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
"Classical music came to Vietnam in the beginning of the 20th century, during French colonial rule. We have an opera theater from that time, and many foreign artists, mostly French, used to visit Vietnam before the war," he explained.
"Today we have in Hanoi two music schools and three symphony orchestras. The last five or six years, we also saw many important musicians, such as (Mstislav) Rostropovich, (Vladimir) Ashkenazy and the likes, coming to Vietnam."
Earlier, during his month-long tour of Japan, Dang performed with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sakari Oramo, brilliantly playing Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Paganini. The day of the concert, Oct. 1, Tokyo was hit by a strong typhoon, but luckily the humid air did not affect his performance or instrument.
"Perhaps it takes more hours to affect the piano. I like humid air, which is like my home country, but to play when it is humid is very difficult," he said.
Dang Thai Son performs on Oct. 11, 7 p.m. at Oji Hall in Ginza, Tokyo, (03) 3567-9990; Oct. 13, 2 p.m. at Miyazaki Prefectural Arts Center in Miyazaki, (0985) 28-3210; Oct. 15, 7 p.m. at Kioi Hall in Tokyo, (03) 5749-9960; Oct. 16, 7 p.m. at Izumi Hall in Osaka, (06) 6341-0547; Oct. 18, 7 p.m. at Sapporo Concert Hall Kitara in Sapporo, (011) 261-2388; Oct. 20, 3 p.m. at Shizuoka Ongakukan AOI in Shizuoka, (054) 251-2200.
By Yukiko Kishinami - Daily Yomiuri - October 10, 2002
|