Yuja Wang

Born in Beijing in 1987, Yuja Wang began studying piano at age six and gave early public performances in China, Australia, and Germany. She studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing with Ling Yuan and Zhou Guangren, won the Aspen Music Festival’s concerto competition at age fifteen, received the 2006 Gilmore Young Artist Award, graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2008, and was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2010. Ms. Wang made her San Francisco Symphony debut at the 2006 Chinese New Year concert, performing the Grieg Piano Concerto; that September she returned to perform the Ravel Piano Concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. She was the featured artist in the San Francisco Symphony’s 2010-11 Project San Francisco initiative, appearing in recital, with the Orchestra and MTT, and in chamber music with SFS musicians. She appeared here most recently last October, and she toured Asia with the Orchestra in November, performing in Macau, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo.

Since her 2005 debut with the National Arts Centre Orchestra under Pinchas Zukerman, Yuja Wang has performed with orchestras all over the world. In April 2009, she was featured as a soloist at Carnegie Hall in the first-ever concert of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. She has given recitals and chamber music performances in major cities throughout North America and abroad, and she appears regularly at the Aspen, Santa Fe Chamber Music, Gilmore, Schleswig-Holstein, and Verbier festivals. During the 2011-12 season, she performed with the Israel Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Santa Cecilia Orchestra, and in the US with the orchestras of Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia. She made her Carnegie Hall recital debut in October 2011. Highlights of Ms. Wang’s 2012-13 season include a return to the Israel Philharmonic and a series of all-Brahms concerts in Berlin and Paris with the principal players from the Berlin Philharmonic. Later this month she returns to Carnegie Hall for a recital, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with MTT and the San Francisco Symphony.

Yuja Wang records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon. Her debut recording, Sonatas & Etudes, includes works by Chopin, Scriabin, Liszt, and Ligeti, and earned her Gramophone magazine’s recognition as Young Artist of the Year in 2009. The following year saw the release of Transformation, her second recording, for which she received an Echo Award for Young Artist of the Year in 2011. Ms. Wang collaborated with Claudio Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra for her first concerto album, which features Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Piano Concerto No. 2; the album was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Her most recent album, Fantasia, is a collection of encore pieces by Albéniz, Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, and others.

(February 2013)