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| Xue Fei Yang at the local guitar festival in St Martin’s church: the audience is completely enraptured |
| MÜLLHEIM. “That was music to make you make your head spin”, said Hucky Eichelmann, the artistic director of the local guitar festival about his first encounter with the young Chinese guitarist Xue Fei Yang, twelve years ago. She was introduced to him - then a young girl – in the context of a workshop. Now, as guest artiste at St Martin’s, she left the audience completely enraptured. |
| Guitar-lovers came from far and wide to hear a programme of virtuoso guitar music, although what they got was much more than the fascination of seeing dancing fingers and listening to breathtakingly quick scales. |
| Xue Fei Yang understands how to awaken and bring to flower the innate poetry of a piece. After just a few bars it was evident that she searches for the soul of the music behind its highly challenging technical demands. A gentle, introverted ballad in the minor (Jose Luis Merlin) filled the hushed interior of the church. With a soft but crystal clear attack she carefully sketched the melodic phrasing. Some passages seemed almost yearning, while still showing the unbelievable strength that was yet to come to the fore during the course of the piece. |
| The so-called virtuoso passages seemed elegant and almost incidental in spite of the sometimes break-neck demands on the physically possible. In a nocturne by Regondi one sensed Chopin-like gestures; noble ornaments filled with a quiet melancholy, to the extent that one had to ask oneself how such a young artiste achieves the maturity evident in her interpretation. The programme covered many styles: there was Bach (a Chaconne), music from the Spanish tradition and also contemporary music. |
| In all of the pieces, Xue Fei Yang found a maximum of expression and poetry; enchanting glimmering textures in the space over which a singing melody swayed. The clarity of the fast scales in the pieces by the Brazilian Villa-Lobos was ensured by the quality of her tone. A particular highpoint was the performance artiste’s own arrangement of a piece by Huiran Wang (Yi Dance), in which the encounter between the contemplative elements of Chinese music and the drama of the Spanish guitar produced an unbelievable tension. Xue Fei Yang also demonstrated subtle techniques that many guitarists never attain. Harmonics for example, but also a whole palette of delicate ornaments from which not even the slightest measure of tone was sacrificed to speed. The artiste thanked the enthusiastic audience with two wonderful encores. She can be heard again on Saturday, 13th July in duo with Hucky Eichelmann, starting at 8pm in St Martin’s Church. |
| Dorothee Philipp |
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