Brianna Kovan, ELLE
At 30, pianist Yuja Wang has performed at Carnegie Hall 13 times, has played in more than 35 countries, and is Musical America’s 2017 Artist of the Year award winner, joining previous recipients Yo-Yo Ma, Audra McDonald, and Leonard Bernstein. Encouraged by her dancer mother and percussionist father, the Beijing-born classical pianist first began taking lessons at age six. By 15, she’d moved to the U.S. to hone her skill at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, and by 20, she was playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (Wang, whose secondary claim to fame is the bold, look-at-me dresses she wears to perform, has been a Rolex ambassador for eight years and occasionally sports her own during performances.)
We caught up with the pianist as she embarked on a 13-city spring European tour.
What are your favorite pieces to play these days?
I’m doing all three [of composer Béla] Bartók’s piano concertos. The first one is hard for conductors because it’s nearly impossible to achieve perfection. I think Bartók’s a masochist. It was the first piano concerto he wrote, and it’s really intricate. No. 3 is the last thing he wrote before he died, so it’s very sparse and hard—in an emotional, spiritual way.
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