The Walter W Naumburg Foundation presented its 2023 Piano Award winner Yang (Jack) Gao in his New York recital debut in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on Monday 5 February. His programme offered four multi-movement works, bracketed by various Liszt Transcendental Études. This resulted in interconnections and juxtapositions that were pianistically intriguing, if not stylistically congruent nor a totally convincing sum of their often brilliant parts.

It’s easy to hear why Gao wowed the Naumburg jury. The 20-year-old pianist never misses a note. He may inadvertently have played one major chord as minor. Or was it minor instead of major? No matter. And he’s cool as a cucumber on stage. Nothing fazes him. Furthermore, he seems incapable of making an ugly sound, even when the composer wants you to be brutal, as in the raging climaxes of Bartók’s Piano Sonata, Ravel’s ‘Scarbo’ or Liszt’s inherently clattery ‘Mazeppa’.

Gao often conveys emotion by looking upwards in moments of tension or during long crescendos, although this gesture does not always consistently translate into his sound. For example, the variations in the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in A flat major, Op 26, did not coalesce as a unified, inevitable whole. The gravitas and inexorable rhythmic rectitude that usually prove devastating in the third movement went missing in action, as Gao’s dynamically constricted Funeral March came off more like a leisurely stroll in comfortable shoes. But his winged and contrapuntally conversational Scherzo made a breathtaking effect, and with almost no help from the sustaining pedal.

Similarly, the Bartók Sonata largely transpired between mezzo-piano and mezzo-forte, eroding the music’s colourful edges, although the Allegro molto finale’s driving momentum and witty interplay between the hands more than compensated. Gao’s accounts of several of Liszt’s Transcendental Études also found him holding back from climaxes (No 1’s big chords in contrary motion, and the entire opening of No 6, ‘Vision’). He played ‘Feux follets’ (No 5) with jaw-dropping speed and utter effortlessness, along with ear-catching left-hand accentuations, yet missed the tonal allure and poetry distinguishing comparably fleet accounts by recent competition winners, notably Yunchan Lim. On the other hand, ‘Harmonies du soir’ (No 11) poetically soared over the bar lines, while Gao’s imaginative shadings and textural wizardry throughout ‘Chasse-neige’ (No 12) kept the potentially fatiguing tremolos and chromatic runs in gorgeous perspective.

These words also applied to the three-dimensional relationship between the repeated B flats and their surrounding billowy chords in Ravel’s ‘Le gibet’ from Gaspard de la nuit. ‘Scarbo’ lacked nothing in pinpoint accuracy yet almost everything in stinging diablerie, save for the long crescendo towards the end, where Gao’s sonority truly opened up.

Pianists who compose tend to give short shrift to their own works, and the surface polish characterising most of Gao’s work as heard here was sometimes missing from his own three-movement Music in Different Shapes, where again his constricted dynamic pre-set mode kicked in. Superficially, Gao’s language draws upon Bartók, Prokofiev and certain aspects of the French Impressionists. Although he has a sure instinct for putting building blocks together, at this juncture he seems to compose more with his fingers than his mind, judging from the music’s harmonic and melodic limitations. A work in progress, but he’s obviously a gifted musician.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today