Dazzling notes from the Big Apple

By WILLIAM DART

Henry Wong Doe is beginning to sound like a New Yorker. The 25-year-old pianist is studying for his doctor of musical arts at Juilliard and shudders with delight as he recalls catching concerts by Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimerman and Maurizio Pollini all within a week.

His favourite of the trio is Argerich for being "so wild and abandoned, leaving you to think that she's going to spin out of control any minute ... but she doesn't".

Wong Doe always was a flamboyant stylist and he has been dazzling audiences in the country's smaller centres from Te Awamutu to Gore with a programme that ranged from modest Mozart to devilish Dutilleux.

It has been marvellous, a sort of Heartland High Culture Tour, playing on everything from "a nine-foot Steinway to an upright piano that had mechanical problems but looked aesthetically pleasing".

Three sonatas (Mozart, Dutilleux and Chopin's B flat minor work) along with some shorter pieces by Brahms and Messiaen are on the programme when he includes Auckland on his itinerary this Saturday.

Dutilleux's brilliant 1948 Sonata took him three months to memorise as it was "completely mad with notes".

The reward lay in "those soulful melodies that take you around corners you're not expecting to go around", as well as the "jazz-like tonalities creeping away underneath all this winding melody". And it was a hit in Waipukurau.

At the other end of the scale comes an understated Mozart Sonata (E flat major of K. 282). The challenge is "being able to recreate Mozart the way you would Messiaen. You're moving in a smaller sphere in terms of piano writing, but it is so transparent and needs such clarity".

As for the Chopin, Wong Doe found it difficult as a teenager to relate to the Polish composer's music. His teacher Evelyne Brancart got him on to the Sonata, "dissecting it, rather than just ploughing into it. It was something new for me, as it's so easy to let your emotions simply take over". At 25, Henry Wong Doe is a veteran of the international competition circuit.

He gained sixth place at Sydney and Tel Aviv, the latter being the prestigious Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition. In Israel he carried off the "audience favourite" award with Prokofiev's Third Concerto and Beethoven's Fourth - a performance one critic described as "a boy looking in wonder at the wonders of nature and the world".

Wong Doe explains why competitions are useful: "They give you a sense of how your music is received, much more than in a concert where people will applaud even if it doesn't go so well. In a competition you realise what about you is great and what is not so great."

As for the future, his DMA dissertation looks likely to be centred around pianist-composers and the developing instrument in the 19th century, but meanwhile, considering the fact that New York is "rife with jazz clubs and my friend, clarinettist Tama Waipara, is working in that area, jazz might be an interesting area to explore".

* Henry Wong Doe in concert, Auckland University Music Theatre, Saturday at 8pm