With striking ability in Mozart and Chopin, APA finalist Angie Zhang also speaks fluent American

Angie Zhang also favors the fortepiano.

As she wrapped up the American Piano Awards Premiere Series Sunday afternoon, Angie Zhang sought to place her program deliberately in the time and place of its performance. Both in the selections and the way she presented the music in oral and written program notes, the 28-year-old finalist put in the foreground a uniqueness she hoped would be captivating.

Much of the evidence that it indeed captivated the Indiana History Center audience was loaded onto the ovation that ended the solo half of the program. Zhang had shrewdly arranged that by requesting no applause after the first three pieces. All three underlined the American label the competition carries. When the more familiar fourth piece led up to intermission, the audience was primed to burst out in enthusiasm.

Chopin's Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, op. 22, is full of the dash and enchantment that has helped earn its composer major status, despite his almost exclusive focus on the piano. The romantic effusions of note-spinning in the first part set up a turn to the Polish composer's signature nationalism, with the robust polonaise. Zhang played it with the  forcefulness and brilliance the music requires, but never overstating the music's confident assertiveness. 

It was notable here, as would be confirmed in the Mozart concerto she played after intermission with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, that she shapes phrases so well that the way they end seems inevitable without being overemphatic. In the Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271, she also inconspicuously played the bass line in the orchestra tuttis, a practice that emphasizes the ensemble textures without intruding on them.

More essential to the piano's trailblazing role in this piece were such technical feats as the crispness of her octaves and the sparkle of her trills. Furthermore, Zhang's sense of how the solo part folds into the accompaniment in the second movement was unerring, and she made the long cadenza a pertinent commentary on the music's tender elegance. The finale has the miracle of a long cantabile episode that provides the soloist the opportunity for individualizing her role in what ends up being a combined achievement, in true rondo fashion. 

Margaret Bonds is among venerated African-American composers. 

Further cultural outreach bore fruit in Zhang's performance of Margaret Bonds' "Troubled Water," an imaginative salute in pianistic terms to the black spiritual "Wade in the Water."
 Then there was a foreshadowing of the program's stress on Chopin with Caroline Shaw's "Gustave le Gray with Chopin's Mazurka, op. 17, no. 4 in A minor." The mazurka nestles complete within original music evoking the photography innovator Gustave le Gray. The work is more than the adventure of a soul amid masterpieces insofar as it begs us to understand the rich cross-fertilization between the visual and musical arts, then demonstrates it.

The performance was unified thanks to music director Matthew Kraemer's conscientious control of the accompaniment. Besides, he wisely chose the orchestra's formated launch of the concert's second half with the first movement of Joseph Bologne's second symphony, gaining the efficiency of using the same instrumentation as the concerto (two each of oboes and horns, plus strings) and also notching the ICO's final celebration of Black History Month.

Turning to the flag-waving solo pieces in the first half, Philip Glass' Etude No. 6 displayed the composer's preference for "repetitive structures" as a bumper-sticker summation of his formal sense rather than "minimalism," which is accurate enough as an umbrella term for a musical aesthetic Glass did much to establish and move toward the mainstream. This etude bristles with thick, motoric textures that Zhang in her program note likens to "a train chugging along." With her interest in extramusical meaning, she goes on in her note to salute the often marginalized men who built the Transcontinental Railroad. The tribute went ahead full steam, far from most minimalist suggestions.

Chopin ended up having the last word from Zhang. For an encore after the concerto, she offered the Waltz in A-flat major, op. 42. As if to convey she's not too down-to-earth, this piece carries the immortal description of Robert Schumann as being "aristocratic through and through. If played for dancers, half of the ladies should be countesses at least." Zhang delivered an eloquent upper-crust performance.

Finally, a footnote to do justice to the rules of this competition: In reviewing Eliot Wuu's Premiere Series concert last month, I questioned the influence of encores and remarks from the stage upon the jury's impression of each young artist, since the award they are vying for  entails so much interaction with the public. It turns out that neither encores nor oral program notes are adjudicated. Their  inclusion is up to each of the finalists, depending on what sort of audience connection is desired beyond how they play the announced program.