Unless everything is wrong, she is on her way directly to the piano-Olympus
Abendzeitung München
At 20, she's obviously fulfilling the promise she showed as one of the most exciting child prodigies of recent memory, with splendid recordings (New York Philharmonic) to her credit. Her Ravel was first-class...
The Winnipeg Free Press
Her technique was immaculate and her appreciation of the possibilities in this lovely music excellent...this was as fine Mozart playing as I have ever heard.
The Belfast Telegraph
This was a performance of such ease and facility – the fingerwork glassy, the orchestral accompaniment fine-honed... Huang made the slow movement her own, creating an eloquent stillness in her sensitivity both to its flickering pulse and to silence itself.
The Times of London
Huang's lines and phrases were laid out like sparkling crystal in light – not fragile though, but strong-fingered, bright and even fervent...... it was the end of the second movement that was so incredibly beautiful in its simplicity. Any pianist worth his or her salt should be able to play fast. Only the chosen few can make so much of so little.
The Indianapolis Star-News
[She] gave the piece a supple, urbane reading that did full justice to both Ravel's characteristically atmospheric colouration and to his fascination with jazz.
The New York Times
Life is full of surprises. For Helen Huang, her big surprise came with a phone call around dinnertime on Thursday.
The 21-year-old pianist learned that Terrence Wilson had taken ill and was unable to play Beethoven's First Concerto with the Colorado Symphony in Boettcher Hall. Might she step in? Oh, and one more thing: The first concert would be the following night.
"I hadn't played (the concerto) for four years," Huang said during a backstage visit following her performance Friday. "But that's how these things go sometimes. I sat down with it for a few hours to work it up to speed, and I was ready."
Before a captivated Boettcher Hall crowd, she joined the CSO and associate conductor Adam Flatt in a solid rendition that made one forget it had been thrown together pretty much on a moment's notice.
Huang played with a gentle touch, emphasizing this early work's classical nature, rather than trying to inject melodrama - a quality that would appear elsewhere in this all-Beethoven program.
She did capitalize on the explosiveness of the composer's lengthy first-movement cadenza, but this was mostly a subdued reading that emphasized lyricism over bravura.
Rocky Mountain News
Imagine sitting in a wood-paneled room, the setting sun casting shadows through stained glass windows, beautiful music filling the air. That's how it was at Sunday afternoon's Linton Series concert at First Unitarian Church in Avondale.
Performing Sunday was a musical dream team comprising violinist Cho-Liang Lin, pianist Helen Huang and cellist Eric Kim in the Piano Trios Op. 1, No. 3, in C Minor by Beethoven and Opus 49 in D Minor by Mendelssohn. There was a special event, too, the North American premiere of Viennese composer/conductor Georg Tintner's Sonata for Violin and Piano.
Lin, world renowned violinist and distinguished guest artist at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, has a special link to Tintner's work, which was premiered by one of his first teachers, Robert Pikler, in Auckland, New Zealand in 1949. The Taiwan native studied with Pikler in Sydney, Australia before coming to New York's Juilliard School in 1975.
"When I was studying with him, he told me about this wonderful violin sonata," said Lin, who first saw it when he received a copy from the composer's widow last year (it was never published). He and Huang (already a star at 22) will record it as part of an all-Tintner disc for Naxos Records.
Music was a matter of life and death for Tintner, who jumped to his death from an 11-story balcony in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1999 (he was dying of cancer and could no longer conduct). The sonata is veined with passion, explicitly so according to Tintner, who keyed its four movements to the emotions -- love, defiance, sorrow and triumph. Tintner, who fled Nazi Germany, first to New Zealand, then Canada, rejected mid-century modernism in favor of a heightened late romanticism.
The sonata opens with wide-ranging, rhapsodic flights for violin and big climactic statements in the piano (love). The temper mellows a bit, yet remains warm and ravishing to the final, muted passage for violin.
Defiance (Allegro risoluto) is expressed through hard attacks by both instruments and persistent octaves -- double stops in the violin, left hand octaves in the piano -- against overall turbulence.
Sorrow (Lentissimo) is overt, from impassioned runs and lots of pedal in the piano to plaintive echoes by muted violin. Both instruments assert themselves in the finale (triumph), where the harmonies make one feel that a traditional tonal language is going to break out, but is stretched to its limits instead, including a stratospheric high note in the violin. Lin and Huang conveyed all this emotion vividly and with great skill.
The piano trios framed the program in the minor mode. Beginning softly but earnestly -- still waters run deep -- the musicians put plenty of spark in the Beethoven. They drew energy from each other with their pinpoint timing and exquisite communication. Huang skittered over the keys like waters over a spillway in the trio portion of the Menuetto and Kim, principal cellist of the Cincinnati Symphony as well as a soloist and chamber musician, captured every expressive nuance with his versatile tonal palette.
Beauty best describes the Mendelssohn, from Lin's elegant emotionalism to Huang's brilliant touch in the fleet-footed Scherzo. The final movement built to an exhilarating close, drawing the grateful crowd to their feet.
Cincinnati Post
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