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Pianist feels like herself again

By Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com

Joyce Yang didn't get to be Joyce Yang for some of her biggest concerts.

"The first few concerts after the competition, they didn't even have my name in the program," says Yang, who at age 19 won the silver medal at the prestigious 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. "It just said, 'Van Cliburn silver medalist."

Finishing second in the star-making competition brought Yang a lot of opportunities. It also put a lot of pressure on the native of Seoul, South Korea.

"I wasn't me; I was this silver medalist all of a sudden, and the expectations grew by thousands," Yang says. "People were expecting something spectacular. It's like, 'Why did she get the award?' and I had to deliver something so they would walk out and say, 'Ah, OK, we get it.'"

Now, more than four years removed from the Van Cliburn win, Yang, 23, feels as if she can be herself again. She particularly feels that way when she comes to smaller cities, including Lexington, where she will perform Friday night with the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Scott Terrell.

"Small cities are my favorite places to play," Yang says. "In big cities, like New York, the expectations are always so huge, and I always get compared to something they heard last week. They come in with sharp ears, and they want to be gratified once more by someone really spectacular.

"The thing that's missing is, 'We're really grateful that you're here.'"

She says those big-city gigs are "musically stimulating but at the borderline of not healthy for the performer."

It's not that Yang doesn't want people to have high expectations of her. But she does like having the option to play pieces that might not blow away audiences with their histrionics as much as they are striking in their subtlety — pieces like Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, which she will play with the Phil.

"It's not an angry C minor," she says. "It's a sentimental one, and it's very unsettling. The whole piece is full of contrasts, and I want to make it subtle enough that it becomes a unit when the last note is struck."

Such well-defined direction is a fairly recent development for Yang, who started studying piano at age 4 as a guinea pig student for an aunt who wanted to start teaching.

The piano became akin to a video game or a computer to most kids today. For Yang, time with the keys was a reward for good schoolwork or winning a board game.

"It was something I always wanted to do, and something I did and made people say, 'Wow, I can't believe you can do that.'"

Yang soon began amazing more than just her family and friends, winning piano competitions at home and then coming to the United States at age 11 to study at New York's Juilliard School.

She soon began winning more competitions and playing with professional conductors including Leonard Slatkin and ensembles including the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Despite becoming an "enterprising competition warrior," as The New York Times' Bernard Holland referred to her in 2006, Yang talks about the Van Cliburn competition as if she entered with few expectations. Her memories start with a towering volume of music she had to learn for the event.

"Cliburn was probably the most stressful process I have ever been through and probably the most rewarding one," Yang says. "I had to push myself so hard to even get there and produce the amount of music I had to produce — nearly five hours of music.

"I was totally shocked to walk out with the silver, because it was like being validated for something you're not even sure of. It's like, 'Really? Me? You like my playing over that person's? Why?' It was like, my God, I was just awarded for something I wasn't even aware of.

"It was like I didn't know I was a chef, and I became the Iron Chef."

After the pressure of a monstrous competition, Yang found she had a new pressure: being a performing artist.

"All of these concerts come showering down, and you suddenly have to define your art," Yang says. "It was a totally mind-boggling process. I had to become an adult overnight and be totally responsible. I wasn't a college student going through trying to get a good grade learning new pieces and trying to play them well.

"Now, it's like, 'What do you have to say to the music world?' and I said, 'I don't know.'"

In the ensuing years, she has started figuring it out, leaning on her individual reaction to and interpretation of music, focusing on that joy she had as a primary school pianist plunking out new melodies on her ivory upright piano.

She has become Joyce Yang again.