Every season San Francisco Performances (SFP) offers free tickets to its subscribers and donors for a Gift Concert. These recitals are usually arranged to provide yet another opportunity to experience a rising talent. This year the Gift Concert will present the San Francisco debut of the young Chinese pianist Wei Luo, who made her recital debut in Hong Kong at the age of six. She is currently studying at the Curtis Institute of Music with both Gary Graffman and Robert McDonald.
The program Luo has prepared for SFP will provide ample opportunity to appreciate both her virtuosity and her expressiveness. She will begin with two of the prelude-fugue couplings from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 87 set of 24, one for each of the major or minor keys, following the model of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier but using the circle-of-fifths ordering. She will play the 5th (in D major) and last (in D minor) of these. The D minor has an elaborate double fugue, and it has been compared with the very last fugue that Bach ever wrote in his The Art of Fugue.
From Shostakovich Luo will progress to Beethoven with a performance of his Opus 53 (“Waldstein”) sonata in C major. Her next venture into virtuosity will be the three pieces in the first book of Isaac Albéniz’ Iberia collection. The last of these is “Fête-dieu à Seville,” a depiction of the Corpus Christi Day procession that pushes to the limit what two hands can do on a keyboard. She will then conclude with one last major technical undertaking, Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 83 sonata in B-flat major, the second of his three “War Sonatas,” which is occasionally called the “Stalingrad.”
This recital will begin at 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 2. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, located on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. All remaining tickets are being sold for $40. They may be purchased in advance through a City Box Office event page. Tickets can also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545, and any remaining tickets will be sold at the door.
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