!['Philip Glass doesn't require effort – but people go mad for it': Yuja Wang](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/music/2024/07/18/TELEMMGLPICT000384954497_17212995458490_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Yuja Wang interview: ‘For 15 months I stopped playing piano, just pigged out and watched Netflix’
The piano sensation on how audiences annoy her, David Hockney inspires her and music communicates what words cannot
!['Philip Glass doesn't require effort – but people go mad for it': Yuja Wang](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/music/2024/07/18/TELEMMGLPICT000384954497_17212995458490_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=680)
“Imagine playing the piano on the Moon,” says Yuja Wang, grinning. The 37-year-old concert pianist mimes a slow-motion bounce from thumb to little finger and laughs. I’m mesmerised by her small, sinewy hands, which are more often seen in a blurred frenzy as she fizzes through an encore of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee.
In January, she wore a fitness tracker on her wrist to monitor her heartbeat during a three-and-a-half-hour Rachmaninov “marathon” at New York’s Carnegie Hall, in which she performed all four of the Russian composer’s concertos, in addition to his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – those same fluttering fingers producing almost 100,000 notes. Throughout one famously difficult passage in Concerto No 3 – with which Wang is unusually familiar, having performed it more than 70 times in her career so far – her heart rate stayed at a calm 85bpm; but during the finale to Concerto No 4, it soared to 149bpm.
Today, Wang is coming down from a different kind of flight. She’s just emerged from a screening of The Moonwalkers at Lightroom, in King’s Cross, where filmed footage of the 1969 Moon landings is projected on all four walls and the floor of the London venue, while viewers can stretch out on beanbags, listening to a narration by Tom Hanks, and imagine themselves in space. “I’d definitely go to the Moon if I could,” says Wang. “It looks so joyful, the way you just float – so beautiful, so emotional…”
In September, she will be back at Lightroom to play the piano while wall-high enlargements of works by David Hockney – interspersed with live footage of her own fingers skittering across the Steinway keyboard – illuminate the space: her daring, dazzling style a perfect match for Hockney’s own. It’s something of an encore: she first performed at Lightroom in September last year, when Hockney himself was among the audience, and “is so excited to do it again”. Indeed, immediately after we meet, Wang – who bounds into the room in a baggy black hoodie, neon-orange Lycra skater skirt and trainers – is heading off to dine with the 87-year-old artist.
Wang’s publicist has warned me not to ask her about clothes: she thinks there are already too many column inches devoted to the hummingbird pizzazz of her designer wardrobe. Too much debate over the length of Wang’s skirts and the height of the heels she wears, even for performances accompanied by formally dressed orchestral players in some of the world’s most august concert halls. In a thread on the Piano World website, music lovers rip into her stage attire – arguing that it is “undignified” and even “immoral” – while others defend her furiously, pointing out the many immoral and undignified acts of history’s most celebrated composers, and arguing that morality and dignity were “never part of classical music” anyway.
![Perfect match: Wang playing at Lightroom, surrounded by David Hockney's art](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/music/2024/07/18/TELEMMGLPICT000385320432_17212998371910_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In the event, Wang is the one to bring up the subject of clothes, twanging the orange skirt she says she chose for today because she wanted to dress “colourfully” for Hockney. “I think key signatures all have their own colours, too,” she adds. When choosing the music for the Hockney gigs, for example, she felt his Californian swimming pool paintings “obviously” called for Debussy, while his forest landscapes demanded Satie because “French music is like the smell you get after rainfall on leaves.”
Although she was born in Beijing, in 1987, Wang (who now has US citizenship) says she doesn’t like to be described as a “Chinese pianist, or a female pianist, or any of those adjectives. I’ve just seen our planet from the Moon and that way you don’t see those borders or distinctions.” She pauses and catches herself, “Although I did also just see them put an American flag on the Moon, so…” A birdlike shrug. “I am American now myself,” she says.
An archetypal wunderkind, Wang started playing the piano at the age of six, on an instrument that had been given to her parents as a wedding present. Her father is a percussionist and her mother a ballerina, who would take little Yuja along to rehearsals of Swan Lake, where Tchaikovsky’s score trickled into her ears and sparked an early passion for the Russian Romantics, whom she describes as “masters of emotional manipulation”.
However, she adds, “Chopin was my first love – I just felt his music was so alive. I felt I knew this person in my soul.” She also recognised something in the “compactness” of his work that chimed with the ancient Chinese poetry she was starting to study at school. “But every composer opens some new part of the heart or lights up a certain part of the brain with the things you cannot communicate in words,” Wang says. “Music is a more direct transmission.”
![tmg.video.placeholder.alt NsqXCO0ADwM](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NsqXCO0ADwM/mqdefault.jpg)
At the age of seven, she enrolled at the Beijing Central Conservatory before moving to Calgary, in Canada, when she was 14 to attend the Mount Royal University Conservatory. In 2003, she went to America to study at the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, graduating five years later. Although she started winning major prizes from the age of 11, Wang is dismissive of classical music’s competition circuit. “Competitions treat making music like playing sport,” she says. “Yet it is not a sport – it’s all subjective. When I started out doing competitions in China, I wanted to focus more on the performance than the winning. Subconsciously, I was already preparing for a career.”
Wang got her big break in 2007, when she stepped in as a last-minute replacement after the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich cancelled a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She went on to make her Carnegie Hall debut in 2011. By 2012, the San Francisco Chronicle’s critic was declaring her “quite simply, the most dazzlingly, uncannily gifted pianist in the concert world today”. Flipping through later reviews, you’ll find praise of her “fearsome fortissimo”, “liquid phrasing”, “mischief”, “nuance”, “delicacy”, “joy”, “ravishing elan” and “unfathomable dexterity”.
Does she ever think that audiences who come to hear her are already so convinced of her brilliance that they wouldn’t notice if she had an off night? “Yeah!” she laughs. “Sometimes I am, like: Did you hear that? It was really s---!” She dissolves into rebel giggles and adds that it’s often the simplest pieces that earn her the loudest applause. “I am just laughing,” she says, “because something like the Philip Glass [Etude No 6], that’s a piece I can sight-read and memorise the next minute. It’s super easy, not requiring any of my effort, really. But every time I play that piece, people go apes--- for it.”
Listening to her speak, you get the sense that the audience doesn’t always live up to her high expectations of them, mistaking the darkness in which they sit for a cloak of invisibility. “Music comes from silence, but I can hear them coughing, unwrapping candy,” she says. “I know it’s probably so sensitive to say, but that’s insulting to me, because if you are really gripped by something, then you don’t cough, you don’t unwrap candy. You do that when you are bored.”
!['If you are gripped by a concert, you don't cough. You do that when you're bored'](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/music/2024/07/18/TELEMMGLPICT000384954483_17212998849920_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
She says that being a solo pianist can be lonely. “If you are a solo violinist, you can go and discuss bowing with the rest of the string section. For me, I have to take a book to rehearsals. The piano is isolated, so you are an outsider, a star that must shine alone.”
When Wang is not on the road, she lives alone in New York. (For a while, she was linked to Klaus Mäkelä, the 28-year-old Finnish conductor who is one of classical music’s fastest rising stars, but the relationship ended earlier this year.) She admits that she stopped playing the piano entirely during the city’s pandemic lockdown in 2020. “I promised myself to only practise when I wanted to,” she says, “and then I didn’t want to for 15 months!”
Instead, she claims, “I just pigged out and watched Netflix. I let my brain drift into stupid movies. I loved the first half of that year, but after six months I got sick of just taking care of myself. Taking showers and feeding myself. I became so conscious of being human, and asking existential questions.”
On stage, the trivialities of survival fall away from her. “People ask why I play for so long, go back for so many encores,” she says. “Some of that is for my fans, but some of it is for me, because when I’m playing like that I’m in a space where I forget everything but the music. It’s hard for me to stop. Like those astronauts on the Moon who didn’t want to stop bouncing around in zero gravity.”
When it comes to selecting the programme for her concert in Edinburgh next month, Wang tells me she is sifting through “a whole list of 30 pieces. When I think about them, I imagine fairy tales, drama, tranquillity, revenge… I put them together like emotional journeys. The piano exists mostly in the imagination and I do what I feel like.”
As she hops up from her chair, excited about her imminent reunion with Hockney, I ask Wang about her future career goals and she suggests she’d like to do more simultaneous playing and conducting. “I’ve done a little already and I loved it,” she says, then a cheeky smile pings across her face. “It was like doing it with the condom off!”
Yuja Wang performs at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh (eif.co.uk), on Aug 5. Lightroom Live: Yuja x Hockney is at Lightroom, London N1 (lightroom.uk) from Sept 5–8