Yuja Wang was born on 10 February 1987 in Beijing to an artistic Hui family (her mother a dancer, her father a percussionist) and began piano at age six, entering Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music at seven. At fifteen she moved to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia to study with Gary Graffman, graduating in 2008. Her breakthrough came in March 2007 when, at nineteen, she stepped in for Martha Argerich in a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. She signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon by age 21 and has since performed with virtually every major orchestra and conductor, including debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic (2015) and world premieres of concertos written for her by John Adams and Magnus Lindberg. She lives in New York City.

Yuja Wang has become one of the most prominent pianists of her generation, admired for a combination of formidable, effortless-seeming virtuosity in the Russian and Romantic repertoire (Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky) with an increasingly wide-ranging concert persona that blends rigorous musicianship with a bold, individual stage presence. Stepping in for Argerich at the start of her career symbolically linked her to an earlier generation of dazzling virtuosos, and her subsequent recordings and marathon programmes (including complete cycles of the Rachmaninoff concertos in a single evening) have helped sustain popular audience interest in large-scale virtuoso piano repertoire in the 21st century.

Sources:

• https://www.allmusic.com/artist/yuja-wang-mn0002061465
• https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/arts/music/yuja-wang-review-hammerklavier-carnegie-hall.html