Carnegie Hall+

Revered for her impeccable technique and insightful artistry, pianist Yuja Wang is a phenomenon of the classical music world. Her frequent appearances at Carnegie Hall—elegant, exuberant, stylish—send critics rushing to find precisely the right adjectives for her playing. “Granitic and gauzy to eerily brilliant,” raved The New York Times following a 2013 recital. “Clear, chaste, and feather-light,” ventured The Washington Post. “In all seriousness,” wondered the Times following another concert in 2019, “what can’t Yuja Wang do?”

Born in Beijing in 1987 to an artistic family, Yuja Wang’s mother was a dancer and her father a percussionist—both, she has said, helped her early on with her rhythm. After studies at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, she left her parents when she was only 14 to continue at the Mount Royal University Conservatory in Calgary. She entered the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia the next year, where she studied for half a decade with Gary Graffman, a renowned Gershwin interpreter who noted her “gorgeous sound” early on.

Yuja’s odyssey into the public eye was initially the product of a number of high-profile substitutions for pianists, including Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, and Yefim Bronfman. She would soon go on to sweep many of the music industry’s most prestigious prizes, including the Gilmore Young Artist Award, Gramophone Young Artist of the Year, and Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Yuja signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 2009. An extensive catalog of albums, as well as numerous Grammy Award nominations, soon followed—leading to her being named 2017’s Artist of the Year by Musical America, which announced in its annual honors that she “represents a new breed—the complete, thoroughly modern package.”

While in her early years she hewed close to the Romantic works of Chopin and Liszt, her recent career has indeed brought Yuja great success in more modern fare, particularly the riveting masterworks of Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich. “Those Russian pieces, they have a way of bringing out all the emotions, longings, the nostalgic feelings in us,” she once explained in an interview. “But at the same time, it’s like something larger than life, larger than human, something we’re all connected to … something bigger than us.”

Yet even as she conquered the 20th century’s most towering works, it was as much the variety of her playing as her virtuosic dazzle that earned her a starry spate of admirers. Many fellow musicians—among them violinist Leonidas Kavakos, cellist Gautier Capuçon, and comic duo Igudesman & Joo—jumped at the chance to join forces on her six-concert Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall in the 2018–2019 season.

“When I first heard her, I was struck by how coloristic her playing is and how aware she is of the specific colors and character of the orchestra,” fellow Perspectives artist Michael Tilson Thomas told The New York Times. “She will play as a soloist but also as an accompanist when important things are happening in the orchestra. That is an unusual quality for a card-carrying virtuoso.”

Indeed, across her entries on Carnegie Hall+, Yuja’s gleaming palette of pianistic colors are on full display. The sweetly melodic, wistful, and steely elements of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 all come alive, inspiring the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to imaginative new heights. The sleek and urbane opening of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G at the Salzburg Festival is played faster than one might usually expect, laying out a glittering canvas for the breathless romance of the second-movement Adagio. New additions to the channel continue to showcase Yuja’s artistry, including a 2021 performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Munich Philharmonic, and a 2024 performance with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which features Wang directing the ensemble from the piano.

In these performances and countless others, Yuja Wang captivates with a dazzling sound, finding sparkle even in the most sardonic concert pieces of the last century. On Carnegie Hall+, subscribers come face to face with a musician whose playing honors the piano repertoire of the past while boldly forging a new future.

Photography by Marco Borrelli, Marcus Schlaf, and Julia Wesely.