I’m lucky to catch Yuja Wang in her home city. The China-born superstar pianist, one of the most celebrated classical music performers today, is in demand around the world and spends only a month a year in New York. Wang’s concert dates are booked two years in advance and her summer tour — a programme of concertos by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Kapustin — will take her through South America, then on to Europe and around the US.
A musical prodigy who is admired by the most exacting of critics, Wang, 38, now has the celebrity status of a pop entertainer. She won her first Grammy music award last year and her albums have topped the Billboard charts for classical music. She has secured sponsorship deals with Rolex, Louis Vuitton and Estée Lauder China. Tellingly, the instrument maker Steinway touts Wang in the same sentence as the Piano Man himself, Billy Joel, in its investor documents but it is Wang who is pictured, not Joel.
She has chosen to dine at Mandarin Oriental, and walks unnoticed to our table overlooking Columbus Circle. We order coffees as we assess the menu. It’s a no to the caviar, but Wang’s eyes dart to the desserts. “Look at that — chocolate leaves,” she says.
Spring green brightens the tops of the trees in Central Park, visible through the nearby windows, but in classical music these days, the mood is rather grey. As well as perennial concerns about ageing audiences and the pressures faced by young performers in the internet age, musicians and creatives around the world are calling for urgent protections in the face of what they consider to be an existential threat posed by AI.
Then, in the US at least, there is political anxiety. In February, President Donald Trump installed himself as the new chair of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in DC, promising to steer programming to his political liking. Meanwhile, allies of the president have called for the National Endowment for the Arts, a funding source for orchestras across the country, to be eliminated.
We begin by discussing one of the defining moments of her career to date: an unprecedented performance that she gave at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2023 of Sergei Rachmaninov’s four piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini”. The programme spanned two and a half hours, 621 pages of score and more than 97,000 piano notes. Wang organised the structure of the concert herself, sandwiching the composer’s lesser-known concertos — one and four — between the more famous second and third.
“There were lots of questions [beforehand],” she says, “[but] I’m like, ‘trust me I can do it’.”
During the concert, both Wang and the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin wore devices to track their heart rates. Afterwards Carnegie Hall released data that charted fluctuations during the course of the event, and estimated that Wang burnt 2,427 calories during the performance, almost the same as a marathon runner.
“They think that’s interesting, fine,” she grimaces. I suggest the data might be interesting to people who might not otherwise be engaged in classical music. “If it is, it is pretty sad,” she says. “I was an accomplice but the whole time I was not a big fan of how this should be measured.”
“I would love to emphasise the emotional journey,” she continues. “And that’s exactly what I said in the beginning. But the project was already being sponsored so I couldn’t pull out. I was trying to please everybody.”
“It has nothing to do with how many steps, how many calories. It is much more metaphysical — that response — and that’s why music is much more immeasurable than that.”
Wang survived her Rachmaninov marathon. But there was a drama in the auditorium, with one of the concertgoers suffering a heart attack. “By the time I finished [the concert], he’d already had an operation,” she says. “Carnegie [Hall] was very proud [of] how many doctors were in the audience.”
We pause to order our mains. Wang goes for the branzino with artichoke and snap peas. I’m leaning towards a salad. “Just a salad for you?” She says. I reconsider as our waiter hovers and opt for a turkey club sandwich.
Born in Beijing, Wang had a musical upbringing. Her mother is a dancer, her father a percussionist, and there was a piano in the house. “I’m very visual because my mom taught me how to read scores before I even started piano. I think that’s why it was fun to finally play it on the piano when I was six.”
She began her studies at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, but at the age of just 14 she left her parents in China and moved first to Canada, then the US, where she enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “It was just total autonomy,” she says, “it was super blissful to not have parents [around].”
Curtis alumni include Leonard Bernstein, Jonathan Biss and Wang’s Chinese compatriot Lang Lang — and like Lang Lang, Wang studied under famed pianist Gary Graffman, whom she describes as a mentor. Graffman, now 96, who as president of Curtis in the late 1990s and early 2000s oversaw an expansion of Chinese students, was “completely opposed to competitions, which I totally agree [with],” she says. “You can’t judge who’s first prize and who’s better than others. That’s not what art is. You can’t put Vermeer next to Van Gogh and say who [gets] first prize.”
In 2007, Wang got her big break, stepping in to replace the revered Argentine pianist Martha Argerich in four concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which included one of her first public performances of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
Menu
Mandarin Oriental
80 Columbus Circle, New York, 10023
Americano $12
Cappuccino $14
Branzino $44
Club sandwich $35
Chocolate leaves $24
Total (incl tax and tip) $165.73
As our food arrives (“you got little fans,” Wang says of the miniature parasols speared through my sandwich”) I raise the subject of classical music’s greying audience, but it’s a concern that is swiftly dismissed. “That’s so stupid, I mean, it’s so untrue.” Nowadays, there are more orchestras and more opportunities for classical music, she says, “with all the streaming platforms, people are actually listening also way more.” Wang raises a different and underrated problem: the narrowing of the classical piano repertoire.
There are about 10 piano concertos that are most in demand. Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, “the working artists have to play those,” she says. “The high-level artists never have time to play the neglected, [lesser-known] pieces and so who plays them?” For example, György Ligeti’s five-movement piano concerto, which she says is hard to play. “You have no idea how many people said no” to performing that. Wang says she is now able to steer programming towards under-appreciated composers. “But I couldn’t do that in the beginning, before I made a name.”
In the US, she argues, this problem is compounded by an orchestra’s union rules, which can interfere with the long rehearsals needed to refine complex works. “That gets in the way of actually being creative artists trying to explore music . . . You’re in the middle of a crescendo. ‘Sorry, it’s 12:30’,” she says. “That’s very American.”
Wang is, however, cheered by the announcement of star conductor Gustavo Dudamel as music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, where she has been an artist-in-residence. What is exciting, she says, is not so much the buzz Dudamel is bringing to New York, but rather his ambitious approach to programming, and his ability “to commission new [composers] and not worry about, ‘oh, is that going to attract an audience?’ Because the audience is there.”
She is clear about the importance of early exposure to a wide range of repertoire, from new compositions to the great canonical works. “Having access to this music as a kid makes a life . . . It doesn’t matter if you become a musician or not. It makes a life so different. You tap into some region in the psychic area. I feel it is essential for human growth as a good human.”
Wang is clearly undaunted by the new — whether this is contemporary music or technological innovation. Our conversation touches on fears about smartphones affecting kids’ attention spans. “It’s not just kids, me too!” she jokes “[But] I feel like that’s a society’s hyped message.” It is the same hyperventilating going on now about artificial intelligence, she says, adding that she uses ChatGPT.
Recently, prominent creatives including Elton John have pushed for stronger copyright protections. In November, the violinist Hilary Hahn said she had received reports she was being targeted by AI imitation. Wang, however, remains surprisingly sanguine. “I think we should just take advantage of what’s available out there and forget about the negative effects first and see what’s beneficial first and use it. Like the whole thing about AI — it’s actually really facilitating how I want to communicate a lot.”
Traditionally, professional pianists have always memorised music for performance but Wang, who has played plenty of works from memory, says she often uses iPad scores for contemporary pieces. Would you ever try composing your own work? I ask. “I would love to. I don’t know how to tap into that yet.” Improvisation is another area of interest, Wang says, as she mentions seeing New Orleans pianist Sullivan Fortner at New York’s Village Vanguard this year. “I just admire how [these musicians] can improvise . . . to me, I’m like, [I] wish I can be that creative.”
As the waiter returns to clear our plates, we consider the dessert menu. “I do want to try the chocolate leaves,” Wang says. We decide to split it.
The Covid-19 pandemic offered plenty of time for reflection: Wang did not play the piano at all for 15 months. “It makes sense, if you started playing at six,” she says. It was a sabbatical she had not asked for and had never got before. “I started thinking . . . ‘is there some job that I could do that’s not this?’”
She acknowledges there are frustrations that come with being a top classical musician — especially a female one. There are times when more attention is given to Wang’s choice of outfit than her concert performance. “After I really give everything I have,” she says, “the questions are often ‘how do you pedal with your heels?’ I’m like, ‘oh my God’.” Then there are the practical challenges of day-to-day life on the road. “One day you’re the queen on stage, the next morning you’re in an airport being scolded at [by] security,” she says. “The actual existence of being a professional . . . if one is not a little bit mad [then] it’s kind of intolerable.”
So what advice do you give younger musicians? “I get this question asked like ‘how does it feel to be a female artist pianist?,” Wang says. “As a woman you have to be also charming, sociable, understanding, you know all those virtues . . . You have to be a complete, perfect human being on top of being an extremely talented and competent working professional musician.”
The demands of working women appear to have been on her mind, and she opens up about confronting the balance of kids and a career. Soprano Maria Callas, who she turns to for inspirational quotes, didn’t have children. Wang says she struggles to see how it might be possible to balance children and a career. “Do I reproduce another me?”
The restaurant is nearly empty and our dessert is delayed. But it’s worth the wait: thin slices of chocolate embedded in passion fruit ice cream, and a generous drizzle of passion fruit caramel artfully added at the table.
“I did think about surrogating,” she adds, but says she wouldn’t want someone else taking care of a baby while she is travelling for work. With all the travel, Wang doesn’t even have time for pets. Instead, she enjoys visiting zoos while on tour to take pictures of capybaras.
What?
She pulls out her phone to show me. “It is most adorable . . . it’s the biggest rodent.”
The conversation drifts towards politics. Wang professes to have too little familiarity with the political news to form strong opinions. “I come from somewhere where you don’t talk about this.”
“I guess you are out of questions?” she asks.
Not quite. At the FT, we write constantly about bankers’ pay and the fortunes of Premier League footballers, but the earnings of top-level concert pianists are something of a mystery. So: how much money do you make?
Wang pulls a face. “Oh, I can’t give you that . . . A lot less than what Google says. Google says [I have a net worth of] $20mn, I was like, dude, can I have 1 per cent of that?” Nobody has verified this “and I’m too lazy to hire a lawyer”, she says. But she acknowledges there has been criticism that her concerts are too expensive. In fact, everything in New York is expensive. “I had a sandwich in LaGuardia, it was $25, the last [one] I had there was $10.”
We have finished dessert and prepare to leave. Wang has little time left in New York before she heads to Philadelphia, for a performance with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and her summer tour begins in earnest. “It’s funny. I get to do [things in] New York because of visiting friends. They’re like ‘we want to check this out’, and I’m like: ‘oh, I’ve never been’.”
Patrick Temple-West is the FT’s US pharmaceutical correspondent
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