Having watched this relatively brief (47 minutes) portrait, one is left in no doubt about how very lonely is the life of Yuja Wang. Perhaps it is not as lonely as it appears to be – I hope not – but the film’s makers, intentionally or otherwise, make it clear that there is a high price to pay for the kind of success and adulation the Chinese superstar currently enjoys as ‘one of the most sought-after artists of our time’, to quote the DVD’s blurb. The documentary follows her from country to country, from venue to venue, from anonymous hotel room to anonymous hotel room – a bleak and endless trek between one airport and another with a bag of music and a cellphone for company.

She herself acknowledges her predicament by reading an excerpt from Italo Calvino’s cult novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller: ‘… How do you occupy yourself? You read. You do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other because beyond the page there is a void …’. ‘It’s like it’s written for me’, she says. ‘It’s exactly my experience.’

Yuja comes alive, it seems, only when she is on stage playing the piano, as is vividly demonstrated by the documentary and the complete performances of Rhapsody in Blue and the Ravel G major Concerto which form the ‘bonus’ section of the disc. Self-contained and unconnected, she makes her trademark swift low jab of a bow to the audience (how and why does she do that?), takes her seat at the piano and is at once transformed into another being, not only utterly transported by the joy and beauty of what she is playing but able to radiate that to the back of the stalls. A rare gift.

There seems to be nothing else in her life, no partner or manager in tow and, with a couple of brief exceptions, no friends to chill with. She is understandably bored answering the same stale questions about her image. ‘It’s so superficial. Things are much more complicated than they appear. I want [journalists and the public] to think of me as an adventurous, creative and daring artist. I do want them to think that first, rather than fast fingers, high heels and short dress.’

Her many fans will relish this honest, imaginatively photographed and well-crafted road movie. Whatever would Dame Myra think of it all?