Pianist will play 'hardest concerto'

Wang, known as Yuja Wang outside China, performs with New York Philharmonic on Feb 1 in New York to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Wu Rong / Xinhua

Many people knew the swiftly rising star after they watched her playing Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee on YouTube. In the video, her fingers move so fast that they blurred over the keys. She was thus nicknamed "a pianist with flying fingers" in her home country.

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As a young performer, Wang is fearless in taking on any technical challenges with confidence coming from her grasp of a complete set of skills, according to Zhao Yimin, a Guangzhou-based classical music critic and the producer of a classical music radio program.

"Some says Wang loves showing off her skills. On one hand, she is capable to show off. On the other, few pianists would show off their skills throughout their careers. Wang has gone past the days when she needed to attract people's attention by showing off her skills. Now she is exploring her repertoire, making attempts at romanticism first," Zhao says.

In the latest review about her upcoming China tour, Wang reveals that she doesn't really practice technical exercises anymore.

"Playing the piano feels like a very natural extension of me, physically that is, and now a lot of my time is spent trying to understand what the composer is trying to say and how I support their ideas. So these days, it's as much a mental and a physical exercise," Wang says.

Enjoying solitude and thinking help her probe deeper into the music, she told the US National Public Radio in an interview in December.

Wang currently lives in New York by herself but travels most of the time to give more than 100 concerts annually around the world.

She is used to living alone. Having been a star student at the secondary school attached to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, she won a scholarship and moved to Canada alone at 12 and then moved to Philadelphia to study with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music from 2002-08.

Being solitary is not a bad thing, she says.

"It really allows us to think about life and to think about why people write this music, or why those people are moved by certain melodies. It makes you start to wonder about things that are beneath the surface," she says.

The fashionable pianist often wows the audience with her low-cut blouse, mini-skirt and 10-centimeter high heels when she briskly walks onto the stage.

But she hopes people notice beneath the surface her deft and expressive interpretation of both dreamy melodies and brittle outbursts.