Percussionist Michael Yeung is winner of the prestigious Susan Wadsworth International Auditions by Young Concert Artists. He has toured the world as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral performer. On January 21 at Baruch Performing Arts Center in Manhattan, Yeung performs a solo recital with an adventurous program featuring arrangements of classics including Debussy's Rêverie and a lute suite by J.S. Bach to Xenakis' 20th-century solo percussion staple Rebonds A and B. We spoke with Yeung about the upcoming recital, the history of the marimba, note perfect performances, and why Georges Aperghis’s Le Corps à Corp is a one-of-a-kind experience for both performer and listener.
How did you choose percussion as your primary instrument?
“This kid has good rhythm,” – a chance comment my mother overheard from my kindergarten piano teacher. The Hong Kong Percussion Center had just opened in the same year, led by the then recently retired principal percussionist of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Dr. Lung Heung-wing. That was how things fell into place. Every Saturday evening from the time I was age 6 to 16, I would head to Wan Chai, walk 15 minutes from the subway station, and be in sort of Percussive Disneyland for an hour.
Against a corner of the room, two rows of djembes lined the bottom of a long shelf, the top of which was crowded with various sound-making knick-knacks: Agogo bells, whirly tubes, caxixis, tuned desk bells, and on and on. In another corner was a phalanx of keyboards: a xylophone, a glockenspiel, a vibraphone, and above all the marimba, which was a Yamaha YM-6100, a glorious five octave instrument with a luxurious sound. I treasured my time there every week. There were no questions asked when, later on, I dropped piano for percussion.
At what point did you realize that you were interested in music as a career?
Well, I was always intrigued and interested by the idea (who wouldn’t be if you lived in a Percussive Disneyland every Saturday?), but it was two very difficult pieces that I came across in secondary school that gave me the confidence to keep pursuing music. The first was the xylophone part in James L. Hosay’s Persis Overture, notorious for having the xylophone double the woodwinds in passages with continuous strings of sixteenth notes. So many notes, coming at you so quickly, which you would have to execute without room for error – the xylophone could be heard very prominently over the top of the band. I felt peer-pressured into perfection. The recording of one of our performances is still up on YouTube – to this day more than a decade later, it is still one of the remarkably few “note perfect” performances in my life.
A few years later, Joseph Schwantner’s Velocities was pretty much the same thing – a continuous string of sixteenth notes – but nine minutes long, four mallets instead of two, and everything dialed up to eleven. I reveled in the challenge and absorbed the piece like a fish in water. Looking back, both these experiences really were as simple as they were formative – proof that I was good at what I do.
What are the challenges of programming and playing a solo percussion recital?
A big challenge is that there simply has not been as much music written for us in comparison with say, the piano or the violin. Let’s take marimba music as an example. Some of our oldest pieces came from Japan, commissioned and premiered by the legendary Keiko Abe, over the course of three marimba recitals between 1968-71. That’s just a half century ago. In the States, the National Endowment for the Arts’ solo marimba commission in 1986, merely four decades ago, bore fruit three of the very first and very best pieces for the instrument – one of which was Velocities. And so, nearly all the repertoire for a concert marimbist (besides arrangements) comes from the 21st or the second half of the 20th century – there is no “classical” or “romantic” “tradition” to speak of for the marimba. We face similar challenges to a classical saxophonist.
1986 was also the year when the modern concert marimba, in its five-octave incarnation, was first built. It was in Japan, by the Yamaha company with guidance from Abe herself. Yamaha, of course, also makes pianos, so imagine if the first grand piano Yamaha made was not in 1902, but three quarters of a century later. In fact, the concept of a “concert marimba” arguably only came up when Guatemalan marimbas attracted the attention of American instrument makers in the Panama International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. Another analogy is to imagine Cristofori’s invention of the fortepiano not in 1700, but in 1900; the piano world would be two centuries behind where it is currently. Hopefully this gives an idea of how much the percussion profession is still in its nascency.
Tell us more about your program at Baruch PAC. How did you select this music, and what connects the pieces?
I am bringing a healthy mixture of the classical and the contemporary. Again, much of percussion music comes from modern times, and these pieces by Xenakis, Hurel, and Aperghis act as the backbone of my program and an authentic overview to my profession. Interspersed are arrangements of Bach, Debussy, and John Cage, and I use these pieces from the canon of classical music to display the capabilities of keyboard percussion as a fresh, new canvas for these familiar works.
One idiosyncrasy for percussion programming is that we need to consider not only the music itself, but also the flexibility and ease of the set up for all the equipment that would have to be on stage. Part of what I love about the second half in this program is the simplicity of accomplishing that goal, of connecting each piece with the next with a subtle and elegant walk towards each next instrument, in hopes of never distracting the audience from the music-making experience.
Your program ends with Georges Aperghis’s Le Corps à Corps, which features vocals. Could you tell us about that piece? What’s it like to perform? What are the lyrics about?
Le corps is wonderful! I cannot exaggerate how much I swear by this work, it is truly a one-of-a-kind experience both for the performer and the listener. Its text seemingly describes a scene of a horrific accident at a motorcycle race, in a stream-of-consciousness retelling that blurs and disorients the listener’s perception of the tale. To perform Le corps is to be both the story’s narrator and its protagonist, to pour blood, sweat, and tears into a maximally physical effort – it is a virtuosic agility course for my voice, for my body, and of course for my fingers on the zarb, a Persian goblet drum that I had to learn from scratch for this piece, a drum that frames the entire affair. So much drama is drawn from this instrument, and the musical score itself is already an exercise in coordination and concentration. You will see and hear me flitting between playing my zarb, conveying Aperghis’ text, enacting the drama, and diverting the attention of the audience, towards and between these many different moving parts. It is always incredibly rewarding, and incredibly exhausting. I hope people like it.
Tickets for the January 21 concert are available bpac.baruch.cuny.edu.