Touchingly, Yuja Wang dedicated her latest London appearance to the memory of Radu Lupu, who had died three days earlier. But it’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar pianists than the flamboyant, brilliantly virtuosic Chinese and the retiring, reticent Romanian, for whom keyboard technique was only ever a means to an expressive, poetic end, and never an end in itself.
At the moment, Wang’s playing is still mostly about surfaces. That she has the potential to make her playing more searching, though, was clear at several points during this recital, for which there was no printed programme, just a list of the works being played. Apparently she had not wanted to commit herself in advance and to be as flexible as possible in what she intended to play, although in the event what we did hear, before a flurry of encores, was exactly what had been listed on the Southbank Centre’s website for a number of weeks before the concert.
