On a bright Sunday morning at Tanglewood’s Linde Center, we followed an energetic three-year-old—determinedly pushing his own stroller—into a program that promised something unusual: “Magic Piano” and “The Chopin Shorts,” created and performed by Derek Wang.
Introduced by Mark Rulison of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the event was thoughtfully designed with families in mind, even offering a quiet room in Cindy’s cafĂ©, with a televised video of the event, “in case anyone needed a break.” Hmm. That might be nice for the grown-up’s programs as well! Mark shared that Derek began working on and performing this project since he was a child. He first performed his “Magic Piano” and “The Chopin Shorts” in a children’s film festival at Lincoln Center when he was 12 years old! But what followed was as enchanting for adults as for children.
Derek greeted an enthusiastic and energetic audience of young children, proud parents, and delighted grandparents with his own youthful exuberance. He explained what the audience was going to see and hear, including how animation is created image by image, like a flipbook, projecting them so fast that they seem to be alive. Derek also described how a piano makes its music, with keys that move hammers that strike strings. And how the tone dies away. “The sound,” as Frédéric Chopin observed, “that makes the piano seem to sing.”
Just as compelling was Wang’s description of practice, whether in art or in music: drawing image after image, or repeating the hard parts of music over and over, or playing a passage with first one hand and then the other. Building bit by bit. “All that work is a labor of love.”
Then came the performance.
Seated at the grand piano, with an iPad on the music stand, Wang accompanied an enchanted series of animated short films with carefully selected Chopin Ă©tudes. The results were mesmerizing. Sometimes haunting, sometimes urgent, sometimes playful, the Ă©tudes seemed to animate the films from within, always capturing the emotion and spirit of their poignant stories.
These were no ordinary renditions. Wang revealed the Ă©tudes as vivid narrative vehicles, drawing out their drama and color in ways that felt both fresh and entirely true to the music. With these exquisite films and the fullness of Chopin unfolding together, I was transported into another dimension. As were the children. They were quiet. Rapt.
Derek Wang is a world-class pianist, winner of two international Lizst competitions, with undergraduate and master’s degrees from Juilliard, where he was the recipient of a Kovner Fellowship and the Joseph W. Polisi Prize for exemplifying the values of the artist as citizen, and an artist diploma from Yale.
Derek is now the Juilliard Creative Enterprise Fellow. In this role he leads the artistic direction of Juilliard Station, an intimate performance lab facing 66th street in Manhattan. The Station provides free programs in an intimate setting and creates projects that tell stories through music. The Station puts into practice Derek’s commitment to rethinking how classical music is experienced and who gets to encounter it.
Derek is a creative soul who likes to look under the hood at things. He sees himself as responsible for creating an atmosphere, not just making music. His projects and those of his students explore unique collaborations, with filmmakers, dance companies, and unconventional artistic enterprises. These reveal how context and intimate settings, such as Julliard Station, inform both the depth and appreciation of music. This also propels classical music into the present, contextually as well as musically. (For more about Derek, visit his website.)
That vision was certainly realized here. By linking magical movie making with glorious music making, Wang gave children permission to engage their imaginations and to experience classical music as something alive and personal. As he suggested, he wants his audience, adults as well as children, to leave feeling “buoyant.”
It succeeded.
The audience left the hall afloat, enchanted.
We also left hoping that “Magic Piano” and “The Chopin Shorts” would be shown to adult audiences at Tanglewood as well. It is musically and artistically superb, and we could all use a little magic these days!
