Yuja Wang – a portrait

If we want to talk about Yuja Wang, we're going to have to talk about pigeonholes. Not the pigeonholes that birds fly in and out of, but the ones in people's heads. There are certainly more than enough of these in the world – and especially in Yuja Wang's life. There is probably no other classical-music artist who gets pigeonholed so quickly and often so inconsistently as the Chinese pianist. It's true of course that that's the way society functions: a certain amount of pigeonholing is necessary for social cooperation, we need to set boundaries between ourselves and others. But the vehemence, to cite just one example, with which some people have criticised the length of Ms Wang's dresses is nothing short of stupid. Comments like »Plenty of skin, not much depth« take pigeonholing to a new level.

The good news is that Yuja Wang really doesn't care: she is above such superficial judgements. The bad news – Ms Wang doesn't care, and she makes no comment on intrusive remarks about how she looks. It might actually be a good idea for her to give her critics a piece of her mind in the context of current debates about femininism. But this is one lady artist who doesn't belong in the feminist pigeonhole.

Yuja Wang is appearing several times at the Elbphilharmonie in the 2021/2022 season.

The first pigeonhole to play a role in Wang's life was when she was labelled as a »wunderkind«. When she first turned up at the conservatoire of her native Peking in 1994, aged seven, her young fellow students eyed her suspiciously. »All the other children looked at me as if I was a different species at the zoo,« she recalled in an interview with New Yorker magazine.

Her parents were no great help in this respect (Wang sees them only rarely nowadays, but she won't hear a bad word about them): they lived and still do live in a communist system that completely absorbs them. In the past, they made their own attempts to succeed as artists in this environment: Wang's mother was a dancer, while her father was a jazz drummer. »They are very naïve people,« Yuja Wang says. »Both Dostoyewsky and Tolstoy describe people exactly like this in their books, simple, friendly people. My parents were both very talented and artistic – or perhaps they were autistic? Either way, the environment they lived in didn't allow them to be the people they could have been.«

All this is nothing unusual in the People's Republic of China, but it's not a model that's right for everyone. The Chinese live and work for the community, and not for themselves – that would be pure selfishness. »I don't feel that way,« says Wang. »That's not who I am. It's my good fortune that I was able to escape this system at an early age.«

Yuja Wang van be heard on 27 February 2022, accompanied by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under Alan Gilbert, in the German President's charity concert. The programme features Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony. The concert will be broadcast live.

Ms Wang seized the first opportunity that offered itself to leave China. At the age of 12 she attended a summer school in Canada to learn English, and after that spent two more summers the same way. In 2001 she enrolled as a student at Calgary's Mount Royal College, and the following year she won the audition at the famous Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. There she was, aged 15, living alone in the USA – and found herself being stuck into the next pigeonhole. »People often say that I'm Lang Lang in a dress,« she says about the comparison with the fellow pianist five years her senior, who was already famous back then. »We are both from China and had the same teachers, both in Peking and at the Curtis Institute. But we are still very different from one another.«

Apparently most people weren't interested in knowing this, they preferred to pop Yuja Wang into the convenient pigeonhole tagged »marvellous Chinese production-line technique«, where she joined Lang Lang. A young woman who had just turned 15 displayed courage, independence and curiosity, relocating from China to the USA under her own steam: surely she deserved recognition for that, if not admiration. Instead she garnered the good old cliché about Asians.

Yet back home in China, Ms Wang had had quite different experiences. For most of her training, she was with one and the same piano teacher, Ling Yuan. Teacher and pupil were very close, with the relationship going beyond the piano lessons to include visits to the theatre or a museum as well as lunch or dinner together. Yuja and her teacher spent whole days ie each other's company. That may seem too much closeness to some, but for Wang it was a controlled and safe environment that gave her the chance to develop. As long as she followed the teacher' instructions, everything was fine and she was fine. And the young pianist managed to still go her own way while adhering to these strict rules. Within this teaching environment, the point of reference was Russian culture and the Russian piano tradition, which Ling Yuan admired.

The teacher revered Yevgeny Kissin, Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninov, as well as Martha Argerich and Alfred Cortot. These were the European models that the pianist Wang grew up with – in an environment, it's fair to say, that was focused on achievement, on competitions and  prizes. But Ms Wang didn't and doesn't have a problem with that, as she says herself: »I liked that at the time, even if it was like being in a straitjacket. It gave me a good basis for freeing myself later on, and there was always a balance between the two sides.«

This balance was upset for a while by Ms Wang's move to America. The world of classical music works differently there, with different points of reference and different standards. »When I got to America, I was shocked by how much attention I was expected to pay to the score. My teacher back in China was very imaginative and set store by a personal interpretation and by the sound, instead of slavishly following the score.« One more pigeonhole – but this time it was on the other side, in Yuja Wang's own mind. It didn't take her long to adapt, though. She took an interest in chamber music for the first time, which hardly played any role in China, and she found teachers like Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher who became her anchor in this unfamiliar world. Fleisher was once a student of Arthur Schnabel's, while Gary Graffman had been taught by Vladimir Horowitz, so her role models from the past moved a bit closer again.

Wang was impressed, and soaked everything up like a sponge. And while she was still a student at the Curtis Institute, she was offered her first major engagements as a soloist with leading orchestras, and also stepped in spectacularly at the last minute for Radu Lupu, Martha Argerich and Murray Perahia. Then with the passing of time the revealing dresses better-known from the world of figure skating became Yuja Wang's trademark, likewise her extremely high-heeled platform shoes – and these fashion features ended up pushing Wang into the trivial corner, into the pigeonhole labelled »Plenty of skin, not much depth«. Her playing is never less than outstanding, no-one disputes that, and her virtuosity is not open to doubt. But many classical-music lovers still labour under the illusion that someone who shows too much on the surface probably offers too little depth.