Yuja Wang

Yuja Wang entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing at a young age to study under Ling Yuan and Zhou Guangren. From 1999 to 2001 she participated in the Morningside Music summer program at Calgary’s Mount Royal College, an artistic and cultural exchange program between Canada and China, and began studying with Hung-Kuan Chen and Tema Blackstone at the Mount Royal College Conservatory. Ms. Wang then moved to the US to study with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, from which she graduated in 2008. In 2006 she received the Gilmore Young Artist Award and in 2010 was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in February 2006 and became a Shenson Young Artist later that year. She was also the featured artist in the San Francisco Symphony’s 2010–11 Project San Francisco initiative.

This season the London Symphony Orchestra has invited Ms. Wang as their featured artist in the LSO Artist Portrait series for 2014, which includes performing three concertos, a recital and chamber music in London, followed by a tour of China. She also makes her debut with the Hungarian National Philharmonic performing Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 2. With her frequent collaborator violinist Leonidas Kavakos, she will undertake multiple tours of Europe focusing on the violin and piano sonatas of Brahms; the duo recently recorded the Brahms sonatas for Decca. Ms. Wang also returns to the Boston Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra, and tours the US with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Highlights of last season included a US tour with the Israel Philharmonic, a three-week tour of Asia with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, and a series of all-Brahms concerts at Salle Pleyel in Paris with the Berlin Philharmonic's principal players. She made recital appearances at the Berlin Philharmonie and Carnegie Hall, and embarked on a recital tour of Japan where she made her Suntory Hall debut.

Ms. Wang is an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon recording artist. Following her debut recording, Sonatas & Etudes, she was named the Classic FM 2009 Young Artist of the Year by Gramophone magazine. For her second recording, Transformation, Ms. Wang received an ECHO Klassik award for Young Artist of the Year. She next collaborated with Claudio Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to record her first concerto album featuring Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and his Concerto No. 2 in C minor, which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. This was followed by Fantasia, a collection of encore pieces by Albéniz, Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, and others. Most recently, she collaborated with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in a live recording of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3.

(May 2014)