Nottingham

Zee Zee (piano)

Lakeside, Nottingham

15 February 2024

4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“Zee Zee explores the work of classical music’s most famous love triangle.”

Chinese pianist Zhang Zuo (rather better known as Zee Zee) has one of those CVs that make you wonder how just one person can have fitted so much achievement into one life. And she still in her thirties. She started young, training in Berlin at the age of five and already winning prizes, playing concertos etc at the age of eight. Since then she’s been performing solo and with leading orchestras in the UK, Europe and America, collaborating with some of the world’s top conductors and instrumentalists. She has even founded her own Festival in Shanghai, one of the biggest in Asia.

She began her Lakeside recital with Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, the theme being the Air from one of Handel’s harpsichord suites, the twenty-five variations allowing Brahms to explore a kaleidoscope of moods and characters. Each brief variation has to make its mark with vivid immediacy, the mood changing abruptly from one to another. This requires razor-sharp timing on the part of the performer as well as a formidable technique. There were a few wrong notes amid the torrents that poured from her fingers - but overall this was a dazzling performance with Zee Zee presenting Brahms’ vision with compelling immediacy.

The second half was devoted to music written by the two people whom Brahms loved most: Robert and Clara Schumann, beginning with Clara’s Three Romances. Each piece is short and song-like: the first rather melancholic; the second gently lyrical and brighter in mood; the third tenderly persuasive. They give no hint of the emotional turmoil through which the composer was living when she wrote them – daring to marry against her father’s wishes and doing so only after an acrimonious courtroom battle. Zee Zee’s performance captured the Romances’ tranquil serenity.

Clara’s husband Robert was the composer of the programme’s final item: Faschingsschwank aus Wien (roughly translated as ‘Carnival Jape in Vienna’), written the same year as his wife’s Romances and composed for her to play. She had asked for something ‘brilliant and easy to understand…not too long and not too short.’ Well, she got what she asked for: a work of brilliant keyboard display containing some hidden jokes which, no doubt, would have made the couple chuckle. The first movement, for example, is full of surprising contrasts. One of its many episodes quotes La Marseillaise, as a sort of hello to Clara’s Parisian admirers. It is wittily ingenious, Schumann turning the famous (but in 1839 highly controversial) march-tune into a waltz. The whole work needs considerable virtuosity to convey its melancholy Romanze, its quicksilver Scherzino and (especially) its Finale. In Zee Zee’s hands this rather mischievous carnival jape was brought to a spectacularly triumphant conclusion.

All these pyrotechnics demanded an encore – and Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s Der Müller und der Bach was Zee Zee’s poignantly perfect response.

Zee Zee (piano)