Press

Change of tune

By admin | August 2, 2010

China Daily
July 6, 2010

By Chen Jie

The rocket ride to success does not bring any pressure to 23-year-old pianist Yuja Wang, who always “looks forward to things”. Provided to China Daily

Life keeps changing and growing for piano prodigy Yuja Wang, Chen Jie reports

Yuja Wang released her second Deutsche Grammophon (DG) album, Transformation, in April. Music has transformed the life of the brilliant 23-year-old young pianist who has been the most talked-about classical pianist since Lang Lang. She says that the title “transformation” reflects the Buddhist idea that life consists of constant changes. “Everyday my life just keeps transforming, keeps changing and growing,” Wang told China Daily on Friday afternoon before her recital at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA).

Last June, when Beijing-born Wang returned to her hometown to give her first recital since she left in 1999, NCPA’s concert hall was only 70 percent full. Three months later in September, she returned with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under the magisterial baton of Claudio Abbado and played to a full-house, but most of the audience were there for the maestro Abbado.

Things have changed dramatically in nine months. Though Friday and Saturday nights had the crucial quarter-final games of the 2010 World Cup, Wang’s Friday night recital was sold out and Saturday’s concert with the newly formed NCPA orchestra also drew a large audience.

Last June on the day she attended NCPA’s press conference, her parents took her to buy a “formal suit”. They went to Xidan and picked a simple white shirt and cream pants.

Now lots of designers want to dress her. But Wang usually says no.

“It’s a commitment and you always have to wear their dress. And I just don’t want to commit. It’s not going to enrich me, it’s going to distract me. Music is my main interest,” she says.

Wang’s independent streak has a strong influence on her music.

Chopin is one of Wang’s core composers, but in a year when most pianists have been playing Chopin and recording Chopin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the musician’s birth, her new album eschews Chopin preludes and ballads and she plays Schumann, Schubert and Liszt at her concerts.

Friday’s recital was framed by NCPA’s Chopin series of concerts but Wang played only one Chopin piece and even this was at the request of the NCPA.

“Chopin is my favorite composer, but everything has a limit. I feel like I’m protecting myself from listening to Chopin so much, so this year I intentionally won’t play much Chopin,” Wang says.

“Many people knew me after they watched me playing Mozart’s Turkish March and Rimsky’s Flight of the Bumblebee on YouTube and thought I’m a kind of speed player. I want to change that image.

“Speed in playing and showing off the techniques were what I enjoyed at a young age, but now, I want to play pieces rich in color and musicality,” she says.

Wang’s independence and clear direction resulted from her early life abroad without the usual protective parents in attendance.

Having been a star student at secondary school attached to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, Wang moved to Canada when she was 12 and to the United States the following year. Though Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Gary Graffman, between 2002 and 2008, assigned her a surrogate family to which she grew close, she mostly lived on her own in Philadelphia.

In an interview with the US National Public Radio, she shocked listeners by saying she doesn’t necessarily love her chosen instrument.

“I mean I love music not necessarily the instrument itself. The reason I chose the piano is because it is like a conductor, it has so much color, it’s like an orchestra. If I didn’t play piano, maybe I would be a fashion designer, a movie director, who knows?” she says.

Wang did not imagine she would achieve success so quickly, and says it feels “crazy” to give more than 100 concerts a year, but obviously she is getting used to the life of being a professional pianist and her schedule has now been booked till 2013.

“I only want to play the piano. When I was young I loved touring because I could see different cities, different people and know their culture. But now I feel traveling too much is really tiring. I don’t like the life from airport to concert hall to hotel. And it’s hard to sleep with the jet leg. Sometimes I don’t know how long I’ve slept or where I am when I wake up in the morning. But it’s all part of the game, I guess,” she says.

“Before, a concert was like a big event to me, but right now, because there are so many concerts, it’s just my daily life.

“It’s nice to have about 60 to 70 concerts a year. Then I have time to practice, think and refresh.”

She adds it’s lucky she developed a strong repertoire at Curtis and doesn’t need to keep practicing now.

“Many people have talent, I was lucky and grasped my opportunities. Playing the piano well does not mean you will be a successful professional pianist. You have to be tough both physically and mentally. Sometimes, you fly three hours and are asked to play as soon as you land,” she says.

Wang signed with the prestigious DG label and won her first Grammy nomination and was acclaimed the “Best New Artist” or “Young Artist of 2009″ by all kinds of classical organizations.

It has been a rocket ride to success. Does she feel much pressure?

“No, no pressure, I work better,” her answer sounds quite firm.

“I guess I’m just excited and look forward to things. I do all these projects instead of worrying what is going to happen, because I really don’t care what’s going to happen. I just play the piano.”

And when the Chinese press compares her with Lang Lang or Yundi Li, she laughs.

“Oh, that’s old news. It was five years ago. There are so many younger talents emerging. They are definitely the first ones to be successful internationally and Lang Lang is also with DG, so it’s easy for people to try and make comparisons, but they are other people.”

On stage Wang is a wonderfully gifted and thoughtful musician, capable of both superb technical artistry and emotional reflection, while offstage she is quick to laugh and easygoing.

When she returns to Beijing, she enjoys reuniting with parents and eating food cooked by her mother. This time she met many former middle school classmates, who are now members of the NCPA’s orchestra.

“It was really cool and amazing to meet and play with my classmates from many years ago. The rehearsal reminded me of the time we were in the same class and I felt I was one of them again,” she says.

The loneliness of touring is eased somewhat by her laptop with webcam, and Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

She also loves to listen to jazz and pop music.

“Right now, actually I’m kind of admiring Lady Gaga and Rihanna,” she says.

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El verano alpino de Yuja Wang

By admin | July 23, 2010

El Paìs
July 21, 2010

By Rodrigo Carrizo Cuoto

La joven de silueta delicada se enfrenta al enorme piano y a la música de Prokófiev con una facilidad envidiable. Las notas vuelan por el auditorio, situado a casi 2.000 metros de altura en el corazón de los Alpes suizos. La pianista, de apenas 23 años, se llama Yuja Wang y es una de las grandes (¿últimas?) esperanzas de una industria discográfica que vive tiempos tormentosos.

Nacida en Beijing en el seno de una familia de músicos, Wang se encuentra en Suiza como en casa, ya que fue aquí donde realizó su debut en Occidente, en 2003. Fue también en este exclusivo Festival de Verbier donde conoció a los directivos de la discográfica que lleva su fulgurante carrera y la marca de relojes suizos de lujo que la esponsoriza.

En una terraza asomada a los Alpes, la primera pregunta se impone. ¿Qué está pasando en China? ¿Acaso la salvación de la vieja música europea viene del Imperio del medio? “Me fui de China con 14 años”, explica protegida por unas gafas de sol de marca, “y volví con el director Claudio Abbado recientemente. Descubrí otro país, que me sorprendió mucho”.

A juzgar por el interés que los sellos discográficos depositan en China, debe ser la Meca de los músicos clásicos. ¿Por qué esa afición por la música europea en China? “La música clásica occidental es una forma de arte relativamente nueva para los chinos, y muy respetada. Pero no se confunda, en China la audiencia está cultivada y tiene un profundo sentido crítico, muy similar al del público europeo”, explica.

“Aunque prefiero que no me vean como la pianista china, sino como un músico universal”, sentencia. De acuerdo, pero la curiosidad por su país, donde hay millones de estudiantes de piano, es difícil de evitar. ¿Cómo puede absorber el mundillo musical tal cantidad de pianistas de nivel profesional? “Los chinos que estudian piano no aspiran todos a una carrera musical. Para la mayoría, el piano es parte de una formación integral en la que entran otras materias. Creo que los chinos aspiran a ser hombres del Renacimiento de hoy. Son gente de una curiosidad insaciable”, explica.

Muchos especialistas observan el profundo desinterés de las generaciones jóvenes por esta forma de arte. ¿Ocurre lo mismo en China? “¡No, al contrario! ¡Allí, el 80 por ciento del público está compuesto por padres con niños menores de 15 años! Creo que el problema se da sobre todo en Europa. En Estados Unidos hay mucho público de menos de 30 años”.

Mientras se presta con sorprendente docilidad a la sesión de fotos, Wang responde a una pregunta de manual. ¿Dónde se ve dentro de 20 años? “Espero mantener el fuego que todavía escuchamos en Martha Argerich. Esa mezcla de profundidad y juventud es el ideal musical al que aspiro, aunque me puedo imaginar dejando de tocar el piano algún día. Lo que me interesa es la música, y el piano es solo un instrumento”.

Anoche, Yuja Wang tocó en Verbier un programa demoledor, compuesto por obras de Scriabin, Liszt, Schumann y Prokófiev.

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Review: Yuja Wang plays with poetry, precision

By admin | June 24, 2010

San Francisco Chronicle
June 22, 2010

By Joshua Kosman

Pianist Yuja Wang wound up her San Francisco visit Sunday night with a solo recital in Herbst Theatre that marked the latest installment in an unbroken, and growing, string of musical triumphs. With her, there just doesn’t seem to be any other kind.

At 23, Wang doesn’t merely provide listeners with technically dazzling and heart-stoppingly beautiful accounts of the keyboard repertoire, she seems to be redefining what is possible with the instrument.

By the traditional calculus of musical performance, after all, virtuosity as arresting as Wang’s is expected to come at a cost – namely, a certain mechanical quality that slights depth of expression in favor of precision and speed. Conversely, the most eloquent poets of the piano are rarely the ones who can hit the notes with blinding dexterity.

Wang continues to jettison all those trade-offs. She just walks onstage and does it all.

Sunday’s San Francisco Performances program, rescheduled from April, was yet another case in point. In three Schubert-Liszt song transcriptions to open the evening, Wang paid full homage to both composers. Her readings reminded a listener of how tender and dramatically resonant Schubert’s original songs are and of how ingeniously Liszt captured those qualities in his versions for the piano alone.

Schumann’s “Symphonic Etudes” emerged as a bravura display of ferocity and scope, capturing the work’s variety and scale without making it sound bombastic or slighting its potential for intimacy. One of Wang’s many gifts, on particular display here, is the ability to play at top volume without banging; her dynamic palette is a true marvel.

Working at the other end of that palette, she infused Scriabin’s “Poème” in F-Sharp, Op. 32, No. 1, with a lighter-than-air quality, as well as a spirit of improvisatory wonder that made the music seem to shimmer and float. Other selections in her Scriabin set, including the unpredictable B-Minor Prelude, Op. 13, No. 6, sounded fierce and confident.

Finally, as a sort of summation, there was Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata, in an astounding performance that ran through all the work’s many moods – from the abrupt, pugnacious opening Allegro to the slow, musky chords of the waltz movement and ultimately to the light-fingered sprint of the finale.

The encores – Chopin’s Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 64, No. 2, and Scarlatti’s G-Major Sonata, K. 455 – were brief and magnificent.

Yuja Wang is the sort of musician whose combination of talents appears in the world only rarely. It is our own good fortune to be here when it happens.

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Music review: Yuja Wang, San Francisco Symphony

By admin | June 24, 2010

San Francisco Chronicle
June 19, 2010

By Joshua Kosman

“The only problem with the tremendous artistry of pianist Yuja Wang is figuring out how to get enough of it. One concerto’s worth of her dazzling keyboard technique and crisp interpretive personality only whets a listener’s appetite for more.

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony cracked that difficulty in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night, packing the first half of their program with not one, not even two, but three full-scale pieces featuring the young Chinese-born virtuoso.

That should be enough to hold even her hardiest fans – at least until Sunday night, when Wang winds up a marathon visit with a solo recital in Herbst Theatre, courtesy of San Francisco Performances.

For her Symphony stint, Wang took center stage for two works of nearly identical vintage, Stravinsky’s 1929 Capriccio and Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand from the following year. But first, she and Thomas shared a piano bench for a vivacious account of Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands.

That’s a whirlwind of a showpiece, densely packed with percussive effects and intricate hand-crossings that lead up to a delectable O. Henry punch line. Thomas wisely ceded the lead to Wang, who tore through Poulenc’s thickets of notes with demonic precision, although both players found room to bring out the faux-naif tenderness of the slow movement.

Stravinsky’s brisk, brittle entertainment, a concerto in all but name, could not have been more tailor-made for Wang’s distinctive brand of exuberant showmanship. She raced through the two outer movements in a flurry of impeccable passagework – sometimes leaving Thomas and the orchestra to eat her dust – and brought dry but full-bodied wit to the rhapsodic slow movement.

Yet her finest showing came right before intermission, with a reading of the Ravel that was at once big-boned and focused, lyrical and edgy. Wang’s technical prowess showed to wondrous effect in the swift parallel chords of the scherzo and the expansive passagework of the outer sections, which combine Chopinesque accompaniment and luscious melodies in the work of a single hand.

Even more striking, though, was the rhetorical directness she brought to the music, from the grandiose opening pages to the gorgeous, rippling textures of the final cadenza.” … See full article

Breathtaking Wang delivers in DC recital

By admin | June 24, 2010

Washington Post
May 24, 2010

By Joe Banno

It will be a very long time before Washington audiences hear a more riveting performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6 than the one Yuja Wang gave at her WPAS recital Saturday at the Sixth and I Synagogue. Quivering and sparking as if electricity had been shot through it, the sonata began and ended with playing of steely precision and pulverizing attack. But Wang lightened her touch and calibrated her dynamics enough in the second movement to tease out its wry humor and elfin mischief, and she brought a brooding concentration to the slow movement without reducing the performance’s charged atmosphere by a single volt.

In a world of showboating conservatory-fresh virtuosos, calling this 23-year-old Chinese phenom a firebrand would mean nothing special. But beyond the sheer spectacle of all that galvanic power coming from a waifishly slender young woman with a shaggy mane of model hair and club-kid threads, there are the more enduring qualities in evidence of a sharp musical mind and a poetic soul. Scriabin’s Poème in F-sharp, Op. 32, No. 1, was as diaphanous and lovingly phrased on Saturday’s program as that composer’s G-sharp Minor Etude, Op. 8, No. 9, was coruscating. And in three Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs, the urgent vocal lines were always clear and shapely, most notably in a vividly dramatic “Der Erlkönig.”

Throughout the evening, the two names that kept coming to mind were Vladimir Horowitz and Martha Argerich — both of them, like Wang, known for the emotional volatility of their readings, as well as a speed and dexterity that turns pianism into an extreme sport. (One of Wang’s encores — Gyorgy Cziffra’s loopy deconstruction of Johann Strauss’s “Tritsch-Tratsch” Polka — was so stunningly virtuosic, I still can’t quite believe what I heard.) I’m sure that for some, Wang’s reading of Schumann’s Symphonic Études could have traded more on autumnal warmth and classical restraint. But this is a young composer’s score, and this pianist — allowing for some brittleness and overeager pedaling in the work’s more manic movements — mined its exuberant spirit while doing an unusually fine job of revealing its architectural shape.

Wang is a pianist of rare gifts. But in this age of instant access, you can judge her for yourself: Check out the YouTube videos of her playing the Liszt/Schubert, the Cziffra and the finale of the Prokofiev. I dare you not to click “Replay.”

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Yuja Wang gives extraordinary performance

By admin | June 24, 2010

The Vancouver Sun
May 14, 2010

By David Gordon Duke

Where: Orpheum Theatre

When: Thursday

Celebrating the Vancouver Recital Society with Yuja Wang

23-year-old Yuja Wang is the most talked-about emerging classical pianist since Lang Lang. Vancouver audiences had an opportunity to assess her blazing presence Thursday evening in an extraordinary program celebrating 30 years of the Vancouver Recital Society.

Wang’s playlist of music by German and Russian composers was anything but a selection of conventional crowd-pleasers. She began with three Schubert songs transformed by Franz Liszt. Liszt creates the illusion of a singing voice floating over a dense web of accompanying textures; his complex effects are both pianistically intricate and emotionally supercharged. Wang made child’s play of any technical challenges and emphasized the intrinsic drama of the songs: her chilling Der Erlkönig had an almost Expressionistic edge.

Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes followed. Big technique is merely the minimum requirement for this commanding but sometimes treacherous work; keeping the sequence of variational études meaningfully connected and giving them variety makes for an emotional, intellectual and technical tour de force. Wang displayed a rich pallette of colours and a range of appropriate ideas. Her effects were clean, and she enjoyed seemingly limitless energy as she coupled staggering agility with astonishing power.

Five pieces by Scriabin offered a measure of relief from the general intensity of the program—quiet, ultra-sensitive treatments of several of his more aphoristic preludes. Scriabin’s moody F-sharp minor Poème was a pivotal moment in this carefully planned recital, a portal between eras, closing out her exploration of Romantic repertoire and leading us into the troubled world of the recent past in Prokofiev’s 1940 Sixth Sonata.

Many contemporary performances of the Russian master’s work offer steely brilliance but little more. That Wang has both the prowess and sound to tackle the sonata is a given. What made her performance so extraordinary is how she illuminated the full range of Prokofiev’s material: all the brash dissonances and driving rhythms, but also the sly humour (with its aftertaste of malice) and the hushed intimacies. There was an intricately calibrated succession of great moments, but the overall form was absolutely explicit. Wang’s understanding of this often unpleasant but thrilling masterwork can only be called preternatural.

No one can say exactly where Yuja Wang’s career might take her. What we can say is that she’s the real thing: an artist of precocious insight, astonishing technique, and amazing talent.

Special to The Sun

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

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An elfin Yuja Wang flexes piano brawn

By admin | May 3, 2010

The Philadelphia Inquirer
May 1, 2010

By Peter Dobrin

It’s extremely unlikely that the piece has been written that Yuja Wang can’t play. For her, there is no repertoire too steep to conquer. The technique is simply off the charts. That all this piano brawn emanates from the elfin frame of a 23-year-old recent Curtis Institute graduate somehow multiplies the wonder.

She programmed wisely for her current recital tour, which, after cancellations in California due to a sore arm, continued Thursday night at the Kimmel Center. Verizon Hall was stocked (if far from capacity) with friends from her Philadelphia days, and, to judge from the applause between movements, a lot of classical newbies. She gave them what they came for – intense athleticism, a winsome stage persona, and grateful bows so deep you feared she might hit her head on the piano bench.

The meat of the program was Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6, which, in this marriage of pianist and work, might as well have been composed for her. It asks for everything – abrupt exactitude in the first movement, lighthearted relief in the second, a dreaming-in-sound third, and a fourth movement of canny pacing and order. There’s nothing untraditional in her approach, but the piece did open promising peeks into the personality of this still-emerging musician – a touch of mischief in the second movement’s jolly left-hand melody, and some deeply felt emotion as the third movement floats off.

Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes represents a kind of unreachable apogee of technique, but it takes a musical seer to hear the entire piece in her head at once and divine its essential messages. That’s always the challenge with Schumann. Wang of course has the notes down, and she’ll no doubt arrive one day at an original interpretive point of view that doesn’t make the technique an end in itself. In the meantime, I was particularly taken with the way she handled a section of Mendelssohnian lightness; a machine gun of feathers couldn’t have kept pace with Wang. She wisely told you which notes were important in a slow section that only obliquely refers to the melody.

She also performed Liszt transcriptions of three songs by Schubert, and a selection of Scriabin poems and etudes. But the most compelling personality did not arrive until the encores. Scarlatti’s G Major Sonata, K. 455, went at a pace considerably more manic than the “allegro” marking, but with euphoric results. Hands blurred in the Yuja Wang take on Volodos’ arrangement of Mozart’s “Turkish March.” For any listener who remembers Horowitz as the supreme being in repertoire of this kind, here was his heir. She was, in this one piece, as a goddess.

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CD Review: Yuja Wang comes up with a new album of jaw-dropping wonders in time for Toronto recital

By admin | April 27, 2010

The Toronto Star
April 27, 2010

by John Teraud

Transformation (Deutsche Grammophon)

**** (out of 4)

It’s hard to find enough fresh superlatives to describe this second big-label album by 23-year-old Chinese-born, New York City-based pianist Yuja Wang. She has chosen fiercely difficult piano compositions, conquered their many and varied technical challenges, and then shaped them into extraordinary music.

This isn’t simply the product of someone who has spent 10 hours a day practising, nor is this a series of bland or idiosyncratic interpretations. This has the sound and feel of a mature, assured artist who respects the composer, knows what she wants to say and how she is going to say it.

The more I listen to this disc, the more impressed I am. If careers were built on artistic quality alone, Wang would earn herself a seat in the pianistic Pantheon.

Assuming that people still listen to a CD from beginning to end in one sitting, the programming is brilliant: three titanic musical courses — three movements from Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Paganini and Ravel’s La Valse — are given room to breathe by two sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, acting as sorbet-like palette cleansers.

The Stravinsky and Ravel can easily sound too harsh and percussive as a pianist fights with the great handfuls of notes. Wang manages to capture the power of the music, but it’s never just noise. What is the most impressive is the seamlessness of her dexterity.

Brahms’ two books of Paganini Variations are, I think, an even greater challenge, because the pianist has to capture the composer’s inner marshmallow along with the cascades of little black dots. Once again, Wang exceeded my highest expectations in a fleet, lyrical reading that’s as full of heart as of fire. The pianist has re-ordered the variations slightly in an effort to vary texture and mood a bit more.

The two Scarlatti pieces (chosen from the more than 500 short Sonatas he left behind) are not from the glittery ones, but from the slower, more contemplative lot. Wang plays them simply, yet with soul.

Brava.

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Transformation – WQXR Featured Album of the Week

By admin | April 26, 2010

Yuja Wang’s Transformation

Friday, April 16, 2010

The 23-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, who wowed New York audiences with her Carnegie Hall orchestral debut last October, has released her second recording, “Transformation.” It’s the subject of this week’s Full Rotation.

Wunderkind pianists come and go. Sure, they all can play fast and loud. They can burn up the keyboard and wow the masses. But in her relatively short career, Wang has demonstrated why she is not your typical barnstorming young virtuoso. Raised in Canada since age 14, this young Curtis graduate updates her own Twitter account (“eating junk food at hooters,” reads a recent entry) and spends time outside the practice room (she claims to love shopping). She learned about the Grammy nomination for her debut album last year only after a friend alerted her on Facebook. And she clearly has ideas about what makes for a compelling recital program.

In “Transformation,” you’ll find Brahms transforming a theme by Paganini 27 times, Ravel transforming the polite Viennese waltz into wild modern music and Stravinsky turning the puppet Petrushka “into a human being before finally reverting to puppethood,” according to the liner notes.

Okay, so the latter point may be a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, there’s much to admire here. Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 35 flows along naturally with grace, lyricism and a legato worthy of the greatest singers. Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrouchka, transcribed by the composer for Arthur Rubinstein, has a crisp, spiky quality that plays up the caustic, even grotesque themes of the original story. Wang also delights in a pair of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti that are not usual the showy knuckle-busters but rather the more pensive Sonatas in E, K. 380 and in F minor, K. 466. Finally, Ravel’s Viennese Waltz becomes a chromatic haze of “wrong-note” harmonies and fractured phrases, all of which Wang executes with superb rhythmic control, dynamic nuance and sure sense of drama.

Yuja Wang, piano
Transformation (Deutsche Grammophon)

Full Rotation: Featured Album of the Week

One fine number

By admin | April 26, 2010

Philadelphia Inquirer
April 25, 2010

In demand as a pianist since age 16, courted by fashion designers, Yuja Wang plays – and lives – with a spirit of independence.

By David Patrick Stearns

NEW YORK – Pianist Yuja Wang often seems to be stalked by fame.

No matter how casually she appears to have wandered into a brilliant international career, Wang, now 23, began landing major concert opportunities at 16 while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music.  Cut to last year, when she made her recording on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label and won her first Grammy nomination. Then she parachuted into the 2009 Lucerne Festival opening-night concert playing Prokofiev under the magisterial baton of Claudio Abbado – while attracting “best new artist” titles like a magnet. And she’s accomplished all this without a major competition prize (although studying at Curtis under the well-connected Gary Graffman didn’t hurt).

“Lots of fashion people want to dress me in concert,” Wang said the other day in New York, where she now makes her home. “We’re living in a commercial world. It’s inevitable that this is going to happen. But it’s not going to enrich me, it’s going to distract me. Music is my main interest, and as long as I keep that going. . . .”

A pity, in a way, given her fashion-model silhouette. “But you always have to wear their dress,” she said. “It’s a commitment. And I just don’t want to commit.”

Her stubborn independence, keen observational powers, and hunger for discoveries come as no surprise to those who watched Wang during her Curtis years (2002 to 2008). In a world where concert programs are etched in stone a year in advance, her Kimmel Center recital on Thursday is fluid. She announces composers but decides only in the weeks before the concert what speaks most to her. As of late last week, her Web site and the Kimmel Center’s disagreed on what she would play Thursday.

Though Chopin is one of her core composers, she turned down some July concerts in her native China because of an all-Chopin stipulation. She doesn’t take orders well. “So I’m going to play three recitals in Taiwan,” she says. “I’m sure they won’t like that.”

Outwardly, there’s nothing defiant about Wang’s easygoing, laughter-prone manner – belying a penetrating sadness in her eyes that suggests the price of such independence. Having been a star student at Beijing’s Central Conservatory, she immigrated to the United States at age 14 without the usual protective parents in attendance. Though Curtis assigned her a surrogate family to which she grew close, she mostly lived on her own in Philadelphia.

Wang creates family around her: When on tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields a few years ago, she loved being part of the band. Mostly, though, she travels alone, and is one of the few young musicians to do so. “Nobody wants to come with me,” she says. “Nobody can keep up with me!”

She seems rather waifish to be a road warrior – or an interpreter of leonine Russian repertoire. “One stupid reviewer said, ‘She looks like she could barely hold a cup of tea,’ ” says Wang. “They don’t understand how I could look like I’m 15 and play these big Russian pieces.”

Siding with the Philistines, one has to wonder how she produces that sound. “It’s the intention of wanting so much sound,” she said.

An anatomical answer, please? “There are so many ways of playing piano. My mom is a dancer. For her, the physicality of playing the piano is rooted under the feet,” she said. “Later, it went up here, to the diaphragm. ‘Loud’ is not what I’m looking for, but to have a nice sound. . . .”

Wang shocked National Public Radio listeners by saying she doesn’t necessarily love her chosen instrument, but that’s not quite what she meant. She’s about self-expression, and piano happens to be her best way of achieving that, especially since she learns repertoire far faster than most of her colleagues – and thus can spend much time pursuing her interests in visual arts and church architecture. To cope with constant pressure, she convinces herself that her career is an extremely important hobby – a virtuosic rationalization in the face of a schedule that barely gives her consecutive days off. “This is a mess because I said ‘yes’ to everything two years ago,” she moans.

Certain mentors keep her inner life rich. Though her off-podium dealings with conductor Abbado (who conducts her next CD, of Rachmaninoff concertos) are limited given his post-cancer state of health, she counts her time with him in Lucerne as one of the best periods of her life. Whenever possible, she works with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who suggests such offbeat repertoire as the Stravinsky Capriccio and gives her entire residencies, to play concertos with his San Francisco Symphony plus chamber music with him.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s chief conductor, Charles Dutoit, is a tougher mentor. When she asked if he’d coach her on Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, Dutoit pelted her with questions: Had she looked at other editions of the piece? Had she read the Faustian literature that inspired Liszt? Wang came back having read Goethe as well as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. “I was very touched that she made that effort,” Dutoit said.

Ultimately, her greatest resource is herself. The most distinctive performance on her new CD Transformation is Scarlatti’s Sonata in F minor – a brief, songful work she infuses with a melancholy that couldn’t have come from historic research. Where did such a complete and convincing remaking of the music come from?

When she plays the piece, Wang explained, she’s 13 again, practicing for what she knew was her last recital in China before going to North America to study. She remembers the smells of her Beijing home, the bleak yet cleansing rain that day, her frustration at not coming to terms with the sonata and wanting to be outdoors and beyond her inner struggle.

Struggle, she now knows, is her friend. “The more comfortable I am onstage, the more the performance turns out good but nothing special,” she said. “When there are so many things I wanted to do but didn’t get it, when I have that unattainable feeling onstage, people go crazy.”

As for her outer life, she jokes that she would rather have a dog than a boyfriend. But with her travel schedule, a boyfriend is more viable, hers being New York Philharmonic trumpeter Matthew Muckey, whom she has nicknamed “M&M.” Her own preoccupation with creating a high-quality sound is reflected by her description of his: “The way he plays, it’s almost like an oboe, it’s so melodic and lyrical.” The loneliness of separation is eased somewhat by one of his bon-voyage gifts – a laptop with Web cam.

In her 4 a.m. moments, though, she is most haunted by the aggressively forthcoming generation of Chinese pianists, among whom the trailblazing Lang Lang is considered passé.

“Generation after generation, they just get better and better. That’s an inevitable fact,” she says. “It’s all about the subconscious mind. If you’ve heard the Brahms second piano concerto when you’re 12, it’s different from having heard it when you’re 4. They take it in at such a young age. And it grows. . . .

“One of these days, I’m going to be the old one.”

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