Yuja Wang (photos: Julia Wesely)

On Saturday, January 28, Yuja Wang was on the stage of the Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall playing Rachmaninov with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. This was no ordinary event: how many other pianists could – or would – choose to present all five of Rachmaninov’s works for piano and orchestra in a single concert? The programme, with two intervals, started with the ever-popular Second Concerto and ended with the gargantuan Third. ‘I was wearing a Fitbit,’ Yuja tells me, ‘and I remember looking at it when the Third Concerto started and it said 7.43pm. We’d started the concert at 4. I knew this would be a long concert, but I felt like a horse in a race, just keeping going to the end.’

Yuja – if calling her Yuja risks overfamiliarity, it is how she likes to be known, reinforcing the image of approachability and informality that surrounds her – is talking to me from Paris, the day after she has given the French premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Third Piano Concerto (2022). This intensely demanding work was composed for her, and the performance at the Philharmonie de Paris with Klaus Mäkelä, her partner both on and off stage, was a triumph – it can be viewed online complete with a spectacular array of encores. Yuja gave a second performance in Paris the day we spoke, and then took the concerto on a European tour, concluding in London and Brighton the following month, when I was able to catch up with her again.

Yuja Wang with Gustavo Dudamel and the LAPO in February 2023, during the Rachmaninov Festival (photo: Ryan Buchanan)

The image of Yuja as approachable is not mere marketing. But she is incredibly busy. Her Carnegie Hall marathon in January with the Philadelphia Orchestra was immediately preceded by playing all of Rachmaninov’s concertos and Paganini Rhapsody over two evenings in Philadelphia, a pair of concerts that were themselves reprised the following week. Yuja then flew straight to Los Angeles to play these five works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel over an 11-day period as part of a Rachmaninov festival to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. For these concerts, Deutsche Grammophon’s microphones were present – in fact, not only microphones, but also cameras. The audio album is available on CD, LP and streaming services from September 1; the filmed performances are available on DG’s Stage+.

I wonder whether playing a single concerto each evening, after the unique Carnegie Hall marathon, felt easy by comparison, but Yuja interrupts. ‘I really hated it,’ she says, abruptly. Why? ‘Because it’s one thing to be focused for four and a half hours for a single event, but another to have to be there every night. I have to be prepared whether I’m playing for 10 minutes or 10 hours.’ I hadn’t thought of it this way, but Yuja clearly preferred being in the zone and playing these works in one go. ‘Exactly. Especially when the Paganini Rhapsody had to be performed at 11am. For a concert schedule it’s OK, but it wasn’t ideal for a recording.’

The Second and Third Concertos were performed twice, but with filming involved, editing between performances is more difficult than when creating a purely audio product. ‘The second performance was better with both,’ Yuja recalls. Does the presence of microphones bring added pressure to a concert performance, or has this become normalised as part of a day’s work? ‘There was a whole video team as well, so I had a camera right in front of me,’ she begins. ‘I’m definitely not used to that.’ That sounds completely understandable, though I can’t help wondering how she coped with all those concerts she’s given with cameras roaming, whether at the Verbier Festival or the BBC Proms. ‘I’m still not sure how to deal with knowing it’s being recorded and will be there for eternity. The Paganini was recorded only once, at 11 o’clock in the morning, after Concerto No 1 was played the night before at 8, followed by drinks. The next morning you think, “Oh, I’ve played the Paganini for ever and it’s fine,” but then suddenly you find it’s a little harder at 11am.’

Our conversation keeps returning to the Carnegie Hall performance, which is obviously a treasured memory. ‘I was afraid that it was maybe too much of a good thing for the audience – like having tiramisu and panna cotta and chocolate cake and cheesecake all together at once. But it was so amazing,’ Yuja says, smiling as she recalls the occasion. On the one hand, she wishes this was the concert that was recorded; but then she is quick to reflect that although she was more comfortable with the whole process compared with how she felt in LA, she also likes the fact that it was a transient experience, not captured for posterity, to be enjoyed by all those present – including her – without the added pressure of her feeling that she had to create something that would stand up to repeated listening. She is also aware, of course, that Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra have recently recorded all these works with another DG pianist, Daniil Trifonov.

Yuja has recorded three of these works before – Concerto No 2 and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Claudio Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (DG, 6/11), and No 3 in a 2013 live performance with Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra (DG, 2/14, coupled with Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto). In his Gramophone Collection feature on the Paganini Rhapsody (6/20), Jeremy Nicholas made her recording his top choice, relishing not only the pianist’s technique but her ‘profound musicality’, describing her as ‘an artist with that unteachable ability to tug at the emotions without recourse to sentimentality’. Yuja first played the rarely heard Fourth Concerto in 2017. ‘I was inspired by the Michelangeli recording,’ she says. ‘It’s tricky for memorising, you’re always off-beat and the second movement is strange and hypnotic.’ The newest of these works to her repertoire is No 1, which she first performed with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague in February 2022, soon after learning it.

I’m curious whether after such intense involvement with these works Yuja has a personal favourite? She pauses, tentatively. ‘At the moment, No 4. But that will change. It’s such a great piece, but it’s hard to put together, which is why it’s not played often. It has so many great moments.’ What if she could play only one of them? ‘Hmm, then I’d have to say No 3. It just has everything. You have to be in the mood, especially in the second movement. This is a piece that I’ve played so much, along with Prokofiev’s Second. I haven’t played Prokofiev’s Second in a long time but both of these pieces feel like home.’ I remind Yuja that when I first met her, when she made her UK debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London back in 2009 (it’s hard to imagine her playing in this relatively modest venue now), she told me that she found Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto a challenge because it needed a certain ‘oomph’ that was hard for her. I sensed that she meant temperamentally rather than technically – bearing in mind that she was only 22. But now, having performed this concerto countless times, she clarifies things: ‘A lot of the writing is actually rather delicate, almost Mendelssohn-like. The real difficulty of No 3 is to keep it fresh, to still try to find something new so it’s not stale. It’s a huge thrill to play. It’s challenging at first, then it’s a thrill, and then it can feel a bit … meh – so to keep it fresh is not easy. This time round I didn’t practise the Paganini or Nos 2 and 3 much – don’t fix what’s not broken. So I didn’t touch these until the rehearsal, and then I thought they needed a bit of work here and there.’ Is this because these pieces are so deeply ingrained in the fingers? ‘Exactly. I don’t have this yet with No 1, and No 4 is still at the “thrilling” stage where I’m thinking, “What’s going to happen?”’

Performing Rachmaninov with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, January 28, 2023 (photo: Chris Lee)

The essentials of Yuja’s biography are well known. Now 36, she’s an only child (‘Of course – I’m Chinese!’ she once said), born in Beijing to musical parents, her mother a dancer and her father a percussionist. Dance and rhythm are of central importance to her music-making, and she herself has noted that although her parents were not especially pushy, her father was always strict about keeping rhythms tight. She was a child prodigy, studying at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music before leaving China at the age of 12, moving first to Canada, where she soon became the youngest-ever student at Mount Royal University Conservatory in Calgary, and then at the age of 15 to Philadelphia, where she enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music to study with Gary Graffman. She was still a student at Curtis when in March 2007, aged 20, she stepped in to replace Martha Argerich in four concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Charles Dutoit, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1, a work she had never played publicly before. A sensational debut at the Verbier Festival followed in 2008 (just issued as part of DG’s Verbier Festival Gold series), followed by an exclusive recording contract with DG. She was Gramophone’s Young Artist of the Year in 2009, and a string of highly acclaimed recordings followed, including ‘The Berlin Recital’ (read the review), which won a Gramophone Award in 2019.

The impression may be that things have come easily to Yuja. But at the core of her success is – quite apart from her rare talent – a single-minded determination and intrepid curiosity. Her repertoire is diverse and ever-expanding. Her favourite encores may include things she played as a teenager (Schubert/Liszt Gretchen am Spinnrade; Gluck/Sgambati Mélodie from Orfeo ed Euridice), but how many other pianists have performed the second concertos of Prokofiev and Bartók and the Third Concerto of Rachmaninov – three pinnacles of the repertoire – in the same season? When she eventually turned to solo Beethoven – she’d already performed four of the five piano concertos – it was not with an early piano sonata but with the Hammerklavier. Most pianists approach this work via the foothills of other Beethoven sonatas, but Yuja does not do things conventionally. If there is a challenge, she’ll throw herself at it.

Back in 1985, two years before Yuja was born, the French pianist Cécile Ousset commented, ‘It’s true that the piano is not really an instrument for women because one needs a certain physical strength to cope with it. Women have been criticised for producing a harsh sound when they want to play loudly.’ Ousset was responding (in a Gramophone interview) to a critic’s provocative description of her performance of Brahms’s B flat Concerto as ‘a victory for feminism’. Let’s be generous and say that times have changed – after all, when Ousset recorded Brahms’s Second Concerto, recordings by women were rare; the previous one was by Gina Bachauer. Yuja has had to overcome many prejudices, but thankfully the idea that she can’t play big works without creating an ugly sound because she is a woman, or because she is small, is not one of them.

Yuja is tiny. It’s easy to forget how petite she is – her playing is not in any way small-scale, and her command of the instrument gives a false impression of physical stature. Five-inch heels help (she once commented that she dressed the way she did because she was very self-conscious about being so small), as does a large, rich sound that is a product of an immaculate mechanism, one that uses wrists, arm weight, shoulders and back in perfect harmony. When she plays, say, Prokofiev’s ferociously difficult Second Piano Concerto, there are times when she is practically standing up, leaning into the instrument to create an imposing sonority. I’m not aware that anyone has criticised her for producing a harsh sound.

In purely physical terms, Yuja makes up for her tiny frame with a prodigious technique and hands that are perfectly suited to playing the piano. She has an extraordinary finger independence, even for a pianist, and unusually long fifth fingers. The connective tissue hardly extends up the fingers at all, making them look like – to borrow Edward Dannreuther’s memorable description of Liszt’s hands – ‘the opposite of webbed feet’, with fingers that seem long and narrow. Yet, unsurprisingly, her hands are relatively small: she can stretch the smaller tenths, but not the larger ones that would enable her to play the walking tenths of Oscar Peterson or Art Tatum, both of whom could stretch an eleventh. Listen to Yuja’s earlier recording of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with Abbado and those opening F minor tenths with inner notes are taken cleanly, but Yuja tells me conspiratorially that Abbado himself played the lowest F, as at the time she couldn’t stretch these chords. On the new recording – with cameras as well as microphones present – she plays the low F ahead of the rest of the chord. This is a standard way of approaching this opening, an artistic choice for many pianists regardless of their stretch as it allows for a richer sonority and a grander gesture. One wonders why she didn’t record it this way previously.

Yuja Wang (photo: Craig T Mathew)

When we next speak it is thankfully in person, at the Barbican in London at the end of May, when Yuja brings Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No 3 to the UK for two performances with the London Symphony Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth. The Barbican concert is rescheduled at short notice, brought forward by a day, starting at 8.15pm and running without an interval. In stark contrast with her Paris performance, Yuja doesn’t give an encore. Backstage in her dressing room, while the concert continues with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, she is happy and relaxed. Given the late start, was she asked not to play an encore? ‘No, I just didn’t feel like it,’ she says calmly. ‘I’ve hardly played the piano for weeks.’ I recall that Yuja cancelled performances of the Lindberg because of illness, and Tamara Stefanovich stepped in heroically to learn and play the work. Yuja then sits at the upright piano in her dressing room: ‘I wondered about playing this,’ she says, casually launching into Cyprien Katsaris’s dazzling arrangement of the Badinerie from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No 2. I am reminded of a critic’s observation of Earl Wild, that he seemed to shake notes out of his sleeve; except that Yuja isn’t wearing sleeves.

We chat informally over a gin and tonic. We talk mutual friends and old records; we compare notes on the Lindberg concerto and its pianistic influences – Yuja, of course, knows the work better than anyone, but she is always genuinely interested in what other people think, even though she is far better qualified to have an opinion. She also shares her own thoughts in an open, surprisingly unguarded way. There is no pretence. She’s very comfortable in her own skin, and her mixture of assurance – a confidence that never spills over into arrogance – and self-effacement is disarming.

I can’t help being drawn to her shoes. I resist telling her that when she walks on and off stage I worry that she’ll topple over and instead ask her about the practicalities of pedalling while wearing such platforms and heels. How does she retain the feeling of interaction and feedback with the pedal that is so crucial to creating a warm sound? ‘It’s completely different from pedalling without them,’ she confirms, ‘but I’m used to it. The shoes are part of the uniform.’ I don’t think I’ve ever seen Yuja wear the same ‘uniform’ twice, but it’s apparent that this is a non-issue.

So back to Rachmaninov. When we chatted previously over Zoom, I had not yet heard the new Rachmaninov recording, but a month later I’ve had the opportunity to hear some of it. Again, without in any way seeking compliments, Yuja is genuinely interested in my response. I mention that I’ve not yet had time to listen to all of it, so haven’t heard the Paganini Rhapsody (‘Oh, don’t bother with that,’ she says self-deprecatingly), but I really enjoyed No 4, which is the only one I’d not heard her play before. The opening of No 2 is notably slower than the earlier version with Abbado. ‘I thought I was playing it faster,’ Yuja responds, ‘but obviously not.’ It becomes clear that for Yuja this set captures a snapshot in time – to some extent, this is true of all recordings, and it seems a healthy way for musicians to think of them, but this is especially so for a genuinely live event. ‘It may not be the greatest Rachmaninov ever recorded, but it’s the best we could do in the moment,’ she says, with no hint of false modesty. One thing the recording does capture is a sense of occasion – Yuja is not a pianist to play things safe. Beyond this Rachmaninov celebration we can look forward to another solo recital programme, recorded live in concert from Vienna and due to be issued next year, followed by the two Shostakovich concertos, recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons.

Talking with Yuja confirms one thing above all others: she has a voracious appetite for music. When I pick her up on a comment about Rachmaninov not really needing large hands and ask her about the ending of the Prelude in D flat major, Op 32 No 13, she wants to know the exact passage I mean so reaches for her iPad and finds the score. She shakes her head at the oversize chords – everyone except (presumably) Rachmaninov himself, who sadly never recorded this Prelude, needs to compromise in one way or another, whether arpeggiating or splitting, or most commonly by omitting a few notes. A pianist friend recently asked Yuja whether she was familiar with a little-known piece by Albéniz. She wasn’t, and likewise grabbed her iPad and immediately wanted to play through it. Even when preparing for or recovering from a major concert, she craves new experiences and opportunities to explore music she doesn’t yet know. For all her youthful flair and dazzling technique, it is this musical curiosity and desire for expanding horizons that will continue to make Yuja a pianist of such self-renewing interest and importance.

This interview originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today