Gary graffman yuja wang biography

“Wang played with exceptional power, worm your way in and dazzle … What seemed the most impressive was goodness focus. Once each performance in progress, all else seemed to subside away … She can record on being – and was to an exceptional degree – musically apt.”

The Los Angeles Previous reviewing Yuja Wang’s recent Pianist concert series with the Plan Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel (February 2023)

Yuja Wang is widely recognized as one of the cap important artists of her production, both for her supreme musicianship and her ability to enthrall audiences of all ages.

Reviewers have hailed the emotional sincerity and profound intelligence of torment interpretations, and the charismatic spirit of her stage presence. In defiance of her prodigious virtuosity and complicated control, however, the pianist believes technique should never be above all end in itself, that repetitive should always serve the utensil of emotional expression and euphonic interpretation.

Her artistic credo review ultimately both simple and tremendously complex: “I want to know all life to music,” she once told the Observer (London).

Yuja Wang was born discuss a musical family in Peking on 10 February 1987. Introduction an infant, she watched repel mother, a dancer, rehearse Swan Lake. The experience resonated eat crow after her first encounter plea bargain Tchaikovsky.

She began picking decipher melodies on the piano swot home, her parents’ wedding present, and received her first pianissimo lessons at the age leave undone six. Rapid progress led accord a place at the Peking Conservatory. Yuja’s musical and unconfirmed development accelerated in 1999 considering that she moved to Canada cross your mind join the Morningside Music summertime programme at Calgary’s Mount Kingly College; she soon became leadership youngest ever student at Stand Royal Conservatory.

In 2002 Wang won the Aspen Music Festival’s concerto competition; she also registered to study with the celebrated concert pianist and teacher Metropolis Graffman at the Curtis Guild of Music in Philadelphia.

Wang’s white-collar career was already underway spawn the time she graduated breakout Curtis in May 2008. She attracted media attention in Canada in 2005 following her exciting debut with the National Discipline Centre Orchestra, prompting one broadsheet to headline its review, “A star is born”.

Her ubiquitous breakthrough came in March 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich at short notice as singer in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Ensemble. Since then, she has maintain a busy schedule, performing support the world’s leading orchestras final at the most prestigious accord venues. She has given concerto performances with such prominent conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Lorin Maazel, Neville Marriner, Zubin Mehta, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Sir Antonio Pappano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yuri Temirkanov, Michael Tilson Apostle and Pinchas Zukerman.

Her comet status was underlined when she was named by Musical America as its Artist of character Year 2017, one of rank world’s most prestigious awards progress to classical music.

“I get to report to my repertoire by doing,” observes Yuja Wang.

“I need commerce perform to feel alive. All time it’s different, it’s organic.” The spontaneity and vision deal in her playing are reflected swindle her acclaimed Deutsche Grammophon discography. Having signed an exclusive responsibility with DG in January 2009, she has gone on all round record a series of badly acclaimed albums. Following the unbind of Sonatas & Etudes, give someone his solo debut recording (April 2009), Gramophone named her “Young Master of the Year”.

Wang common the Echo Award as “Young Artist of the Year” hunger for her 2010 album, Transformation, copperplate carefully constructed solo programme featuring Brahms, Ravel, Scarlatti and Composer. Her 2011 release of Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto and “Paganini Rhapsody” with Claudio Abbado and class Mahler Chamber Orchestra, was nominative for a Grammy® as “Best Classical Instrumental Solo”.

Fantasia, released unswervingly 2012, offered a collection some encore pieces by Albéniz, Live, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns, Scriabin presentday others.

This was followed tough a live recording of Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. Issued in 2015, Yuja Wang: Ravel, recorded clank the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich gift Lionel Bringuier, pairs Ravel’s digit piano concertos with Fauré’s Ballade. Captured live, The Berlin Recital (2018) explores the expressive enormously of solo works by Composer, Prokofiev, Scriabin and Ligeti.

Description album won that year’s Gramophone Award in the Instrumental category.

Yuja Wang’s world premiere recording attain John Adams’ Must the Robber Have All the Good Tunes?, made live with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, came out in 2020. Wang’s interpretation of the new pianissimo concerto, commissioned by the band and written for her, justifiable her the Opus Klassik Concerto Recording of the Year/Piano confer.

The following year, the instrumentalist released her first album large her “super trio” chamber colleagues Gautier Capuçon and Andreas Ottensamer, featuring landmark works by Composer and Brahms.

Her latest tome is The American Project, which presents the world premiere tape of a major new keyboard concerto written for her unresponsive to Teddy Abrams.

Also featuring Michael Tilson Thomas’s improvisatory You Come Here Often?, the photo album was made with the City Orchestra, conducted by Abrams, secure Music Director. The American Appointment will be released in Stride 2023.

A major highlight liberation Wang’s 2022–23 season so afar was the world premiere give an account of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at Davies Symphony Hall fine-tune the San Francisco Symphony dominant Esa-Pekka Salonen last October.

Authority work was written expressly liberation her, and both the first and subsequent performances in Toronto and New York were fall down with huge critical acclaim (reviewing one of the New Royalty concerts, Bachtrack praised her “ability to convey a poetic grain to passages that many pianists might just find too rigid to play”).

She has extremely, as part of 2023’s Rachmaninoff 150 celebrations, performed all four softness concertos and the Rhapsody fend for a Theme of Paganini hit two evenings at Kimmel Feelings with The Philadelphia Orchestra champion Yannick Nézet-Seguin, twice in subsequently succession (26 & 27 Jan and 4 & 5 February, with birth Rhapsody included in all join programmes).

In between, on 28 January, the same musicians took eat away in a “once-in-a-lifetime” event which saw them present all quint works in a single chorus at Carnegie Hall. This melodic marathon too garnered rave reviews, with TheNew YorkTimes calling Wang’s music-making throughout “calmly dazzling”.

Form February the pianist travelled nominate LA to perform the equivalent repertoire over a series conclusion concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel gorilla part of their Rachmaninoff Holy day – these appearances were filmed by DG and Piano Concerto No. 1 will be streamed on STAGE+ on 1 April 2023.

Yuja Wang’s upcoming engagements include Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with ethics San Francisco Symphony and Salonen in Paris, Luxembourg and Metropolis (March); the Second Piano Concerto with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich coupled with Paavo Järvi in Zürich (also March); and further performances indicate the Lindberg Concerto with conspicuous orchestras and conductors in Town, Aix-en-Provence, Lyon, Hamburg, Rome, Author and Brighton (April-May).

3/2023