Janet Horvath, Musicians in Sync – What Yuja Wang’s Heartbeats Tell Us, Interlude, December 7, 2023.
During the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth, pianist Yuja Wang undertook an extraordinary feat. She performed all the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one marathon concert at Carnegie Hall on January 28, 2023. Wang appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Maestro Yannick Nézet- Séguin. The audience was treated to a four-hour program, with two intermissions, consisting of 97,076 notes and 621 pages of music. But who’s counting? It turns out that noting the numbers was part of the evening. Wang was asked to wear a device to track her heartbeat during the concert, and so did the conductor, nine members of the orchestra, and six members of the audience. The results of this experiment are quite extraordinary.
Read the whole article at the link, which includes excerpts and graphs of heart-rate. This is a link to a number of articles and videos about the concert.
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From tonebase Piano:
What Yuja’s Rachmaninof marathon reveals about the miracle of live performance.
Hosted, written and edited by Robert Fleitz @RobertFleitz
In January 2023, Yuja Wang performed all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening at Carnegie Hall — a feat once thought impossible. But this concert was also an experiment. Yuja, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and audience all wore heart-rate monitors, revealing the invisible instrument at the center of it all: the human heart.
In this video, Robert Fleitz explores what Carnegie Hall’s data revealed — not only about Yuja’s extraordinary focus and endurance, but about the shared physical and emotional pulse that connects performer and listener. Drawing on insights from Juilliard performance psychologist Noa Kageyama, choreographer Martha Graham, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and pianist-teacher Seymour Bernstein, the film asks how art lives through the body, and what it means to face our own limits in sound.
The story widens beyond Carnegie Hall: Clara Schumann’s journals describing the physical toll of constant touring, Rachmaninoff’s lifelong stage fright, and the tragedy of pianist Simon Barere, who collapsed mid-performance in 1951. From those histories to this year’s Chopin Competition — where a young pianist broke down in tears mid-performance — the through-line is clear: the greatest performances touch the limits of the human body.
Featuring performances by Nikolai Lugansky and materials from Carnegie Hall’s report on the data, this film explores how the heartbeat, the body, and the audience’s breath all become part of the same living organism — and why that fragile aliveness may be the real miracle of performance.
⌛ CHAPTERS ⌛
0:00 A cold night at Carnegie Hall — January 2023
0:23 Yuja Wang takes on the impossible
1:09 Rachmaninoff’s concertos: a marathon for one pianist
1:30 The hidden instrument: the human heart
2:09 Taming the body — the pianist as cowboy
2:46 “The mood is gone.” When control meets chaos
3:05 Coughing fits and breakdowns at the Chopin Competition
3:24 The delicate, dangerous art of live performance
3:56 What Carnegie Hall’s heart-rate data revealed
4:31 The shocking calm of Yuja’s Rach 3
5:08 Heart racing in the Fourth Concerto
5:40 The science of learning, memory, and adrenaline
6:25 Lessons from Lugansky, Avdeeva, and others
7:20 “It’s not just intellectual — it’s biological.”
7:55 Schumann and Rachmaninoff at the edge of their limits
9:05 Simon Barere’s final performance
9:45 The Romantic obsession with suffering
10:12 “There is only one of you in all of time.”
11:14 Profound data and deeper questions from Carnegie Hall
11:40 When performers and audiences breathe together (feat. Lady Gaga)
12:07 Yumeka Nakagawa’s tears at the Chopin Competition
12:25 The miracle of performance
13:24 “Unable to stop smiling.”
14:08 tonebase biggest offer of the year
15:20 (Yes, we can do jokes here.)
