Pianist Yuja Wang opens Lucerne Festival
- Source: Global Times
- [21:51 August 24 2009]
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By Ni Min
Chinese pianist, 22-year-old Yuja Wang thrilled international audiences with her opening performance alongside conductor Claudio Abbado at the Lucerne Festival in Summer August 12, with classical music fans in China now anticipating the premiere of the festival in Beijing next month. The Beijing reprise follows the month-long music event in Lucerne, Switzerland and runs from September 20-25.
Yuja Wang performing at the Lucerne Festival in Summer in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Usually, musicians who work with Abbado in his piano concerto are well-known masters such as Maurizio Pollini. However this year Abbado made an exception.
“Last year, when Claudio Abbado saw me playing Franz Liszt’s sonata on French television, he compared me to talented female pianist Martha Argerich and then sent me an invitation to cooperate. In March this year, we had our first cooperation and this is the second one,” Wang explained.
Born in Beijing in 1987, Wang began studying piano at age 6 and entered Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music when she was 7. Her earliest public performances took place in China, Australia and Germany. She entered the Morningside Music Summer Program at Calgary’s Mount Royal College and then moved to Canada to study with Hung Kuan Chen and Tema Blackstone at the Mount Royal College Conservatory.
In 2002, when Yuja was 15, she won Aspen Music Festival’s concerto competition and moved to the US to study under Gary Graffman at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she graduated in 2008.
She signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical record label, in January and released her debut album Sonatas and Etudes in February in the US.
Wang is famous for her rapid style and unbelievable speed. While a guest on YouTube Symphony Orchestra, she played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s technically difficult Flight of the Bumble Bee and her hands became a blur across the keyboard, earning her further recognition for her abilities.
She was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as having “a practically superhuman keyboard technique with artistic eloquence that is second to none.”
