Washington Post Review
By David Ginsberg
Published: June 21, 2008

Some call China the world's manufacturing floor, and that might extend to pianists. Shanghai-trained Xiayin Wang, who arrived in New York in 2000, is among the slew of piano talent to emerge from that country in the past decade. On Thursday evening at the Freer Gallery, Wang performed a varied program that traded more in bravura virtuosity and pyrotechnics than poetry and expression. She smartly explored the nooks of harmony but positively reveled in hard-driving, effect-filled music.

Bookending the recital were works in which composers take musical forms to their limits. Busoni's arrangement of Bach's Chaconne in D Minor maintains the visceral sense of physicality and innate drama of the original violin version. Wang took the searching theme to a poignant climax that hovered like a blazing star over the churning bass accompaniment. Ravel's "La Valse" was a scintillating display of rhythm and color, similarly moving from a cultivated ebb and flow toward a searing explosion.

Wang showed her Asian roots in contemporary compositions. Marc Chan's "My Wounded Head" went from quietly intoned sound points to grand waves that warbled and thundered. Sung J. Hong's "Ecstatic Rhapsody" deserves a prize for sheer quantity of notes, if not for expressive depth. Wang made Wanghua Chu's "Celebration of New Life" and Peixun Chen's "Autumn Moon Over the Calm Lake" respectively joyous and peacefully evocative.

Showy scores truly put Wang in her element. The five steely movements of Prokofiev's "Sarcasms," Op. 4, were unfailingly incisive and vital. Scriabin's Fantasie in B Minor, Op. 28, was a luscious wash of color, infused with big swirls of sound. Her soon-to-be-released recording of the composer's music on the Naxos label should be a dandy.