Yuja Wang

Born in Beijing in 1987, pianist Yuja Wang began her piano training at the age of six. She initially studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in her native city and then moved to Canada at the age of 14 to study at Mount Royal University in Calgary and, a year later, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Gary Graffman, receiving her concert diploma there in 2008. Yuja Wang made her debut with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich in 2003, followed by performances in the USA with the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies; the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics; and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In Europe, Yuja Wang has worked with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Filarmonica della Scala, and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. She was a centerpiece of the Lucerne Festival program in 2021 as “artiste étoile.” In the 2023-24 season, Yuja Wang will perform the two Ravel concertos with conductor Klaus Mäkelä and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and with the Orchestre de Paris; she will also play the solo part in Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with the Filarmonica della Scala under the baton of Zubin Mehta and in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with Sir Simon Rattle and the Czech Philharmonic. Other engagements will take her to the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. As a chamber musician, she collaborates with Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, Leonidas Kavakos, Daniel Lozakovich, and Antoine Tamestit, among others. Yuja Wang is also dedicated to contemporary music: in 2019 she premiered John Adams’s piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? in Los Angeles, which was followed by the world premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Third Piano Concerto in San Francisco in 2022. Musical America magazine named Yuja Wang Artist of the Year in 2017. She received the Gramophone Award in 2019 and the Opus Klassik in 2021.

Lucerne Festival debut in August 2009 performing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Claudio Abbado.

July 2023