Trained in China and the U.S., Xiayin Wang is a rapidly rising star, having moved quickly from the small Marquis label to Naxos, and then onto a gorgeously engineered disc from Chandos, whose technicians do as spectacular a job at the recital-ideal American Academy of Arts and Letters as they do on home turf. Wang has not yet, as the old book by Laurence Peter had it, reached her level of incompetence; this album is breathtaking. Most of it is devoted to works by American pianist-composer Earl Wild that are based on music ...
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Trained in China and the U.S., Xiayin Wang is a rapidly rising star, having moved quickly from the small Marquis label to Naxos, and then onto a gorgeously engineered disc from Chandos, whose technicians do as spectacular a job at the recital-ideal American Academy of Arts and Letters as they do on home turf. Wang has not yet, as the old book by Laurence Peter had it, reached her level of incompetence; this album is breathtaking. Most of it is devoted to works by American pianist-composer Earl Wild that are based on music of Gershwin, and one of the few complaints one might make here is that the booklet notes say nothing about how a young recent immigrant happened to decide to record music that is not well known in America, to say nothing of China. There are three works in this vein, one elaborating a set of tunes from Porgy and Bess, one treating individual songs as what Wild calls Virtuoso Etudes, and one devoted to improvisations (really variations) on a single song, "Someone to Watch Over Me." They...
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