Derek Wang: Liszt on Pilgrimage
📅 Wednesday 21 January 2026, 7pm
Private concert in London.
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📅 Thursday 22 January 2026, 1:05pm
Location: Smith Square Hall, London
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📅 Saturday 24 January 2026, 7pm
Location: Kino-Teatr, St Leonards
“Derek Wang deserves special praise. Game for anything, he played piano, harpsichord and synthesizer with equal conviction and enviable idiomatic rigour”… Wall Street Journal
In 1835, Franz Liszt eloped with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, leaving Paris for Switzerland in a voyage of self-discovery modelled on Lord Byron and his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This illuminating concert by acclaimed American pianist and communicator Derek Wang fuses the extraordinary music inspired by that journey with Byron’s poems and Liszt’s own letters.
Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) is an extraordinary work in three parts. Part 1, performed here, charts a young artist’s reckoning with landscape, literature, and memory, with the brooding Vallée d’Obermann at its heart, reaching towards the inexpressible.
“Could I embody and unbosom now / That which is most within me…”—so Childe Harold, the melancholy voyager of Byron’s poem, sounds the depths of his own consciousness, and laments his inability to bring himself to the point of expression. Liszt prefaces his own Vallée d’Obermann with this stanza, posing the question: How do you find the words, or the music, to express the inexpressible? While Byron takes language to its breaking point as his words strain toward the ineffable effects of music, Liszt works the other way around, testing the limits of music as it strives toward the eloquence and clarity of language.
Derek Wang won fourth prize (and the hearts of many audience members) in the 2024 Hastings International Piano Competition. He has also won awards at the 2022 Liszt Utrecht Competition (Second Prize) and the 2021 New York Liszt Competition (First Prize).
Franz List (1811-1886) - Années de Pèlerinage S160
Chapelle de Guillaume Tell
Au lac de Wallenstadt
Pastorale
Au bord d'une source
Orage
Vallée d'Obermann
Eglogue
Le mal du pays (Heimweh)
Les cloches de Genève (Nocturne)
