Superstar pianist Yuja Wang to play all Rachmaninoff works with Philadelphia Orchestra
"There’s an actual sound to playing Rachmaninoff, a kind of golden, gilded sound," says the pianist.
Yuja Wang is one superstar pianist who is happily doing things her own way.
Though her concert schedule is booked up a year or more in advance with the world’s greatest orchestras to consistently sold-out houses, she has no list of repertoire to explore, and her piano practice habits are hardly religious. Performances are where she’s most alive. Encores might be Philip Glass, Prokofiev, or the Art Tatum arrangement of “Tea for Two.” Nearing concert time, she may not have decided what she’ll wear.
The Beijing-born Wang is also among the very few to ever play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos 1-4 plus the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one series — as she will do over four Kimmel Center concerts (Jan. 26-Feb. 4). But she does that sort of thing. Now 35, she wasn’t out of her 20s when she took on the King Lear of Beethoven piano sonatas, the “Hammerklavier,” and not just anywhere, but in a setting that promised ultimate scrutiny: Carnegie Hall. She did great.
It’s in that same hall that she’ll compress her Philadelphia Rachmaninoff cycle into a single afternoon on Jan. 28. She is warning backstage visitors that, by the end, she may not be able to stand up. And then she’ll repeat it all with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in February.
Wang is known for high-velocity repertoire such as Magnus Lindberg’s new Piano Concerto No. 3 (which is like all of the Rachmaninoff concertos squeezed into 30 minutes). She’d love to do both of Brahms’ formidable piano concertos in a single concert but hasn’t yet found any takers. The irony is that anyone who heard her sensitive accompaniments to Beethoven violin sonatas during her years as a Curtis Institute student (from which she graduated in 2008) knows Wang has the soul of a chamber musician. And at the extreme opposite end of the virtuoso spectrum, she once joked that — in the great tradition of incorporating contemporary music into Mozart piano concerto cadenzas — she would deploy John Cage’s 4′33″ of silence and simply sit quietly at the keyboard, hands folded.
Wang has been famous for a good long while now. She began playing at age 6, studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, then on to Curtis, and by age 21, had an international career, moved to New York City, and began recording for Deutsche Grammophon. Though a strong presence on Facebook (where she recently went public about being partnered with the much-in-demand conductor Klaus Mäkelä), she gives few interviews, but when she did (by phone last week), she was disarmingly candid.
We talked to Wang about her upcoming performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
You’ve played Rachmaninoff with a huge range of conductors, including the late, majestic Claudio Abbado, the exciting Gustavo Dudamel, and now with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is reestablishing Philadelphia as Rachmaninoff Central, partly with a series of concerts titled Rachmaninoff@150. How does your playing of the pieces change with each conductor?
Conductors are such good supportive people when it comes to concerto. They kind of just go with me rather than telling me what to do. I wish they could give me more ideas. But things just naturally happen in rehearsal. Yannick is so emotional, he needs more time.
You mentioned that during the COVID-19 lockdown, you didn’t touch the piano for a year.
I didn’t play for a whole year, I tried to watch movies. It was hard to get back into the flow. Concerts are the biggest motivation for me to practice. I missed music. I didn’t miss playing it. But now, coming back to Rachmaninoff, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow. I really miss this!’
The concert itself is the best teacher. It tells you what to do. You’re focused and very aware on the stage. Different things show up. You listen to different things. The music isn’t contained in patches [as in rehearsal]. When you go through the entire piece [in performance] it’s easier to understand. Your creativity is at its peak focus. When I played the Magnus Lindberg concerto [in January in New York], I then played Chopin afterwards, and everything was different. All of this weird stuff shows up in concerts.
You mentioned that your mother comes from northern China, relatively near Russian border. In generations past, lots of Soviet musicians visited China. Is it possible that Rachmaninoff is in your musical DNA?
That and Scriabin. Lots of marination happens in China. I’ve always adored Russian music. When I went to Curtis, I was off the leash. There’s an actual sound to playing Rachmaninoff, a kind of golden, gilded sound. With the musicians who play this music, like Benno Moiseiwitsch and Rachmaninoff himself, there’s a clarity and lightness in their playing. And it’s piano playing on the highest level.
You make it look easy.
People always think that. I really don’t want to come across as it being easy. It’s more of a roller coaster. Well, that’s art.
You’ve played Rachmaninoff a lot. Taken as a whole do you feel there’s an arc in his progression of concertos?
The language is very different but it’s all Rachmaninoff. It’s like listening to Wagner’s Ring Cycle. You see the life of the composer. The first concerto is influenced by Tchaikovsky; there are photographs of the two of them together. He was 18 and there’s something naively romantic about it. In Two [Piano Concerto No. 2] there’s a change, Three [Piano Concerto No. 3] is the Everest, and fun to play when you get super-tight with the orchestra. I’ve played the concertos a lot except for One and Four. The fourth concerto — it has Hollywood in it, really like a glamorous Hollywood film that’s a bit yellow with age. You also hear Ravel and Stravinsky.
How does Mäkelä influence your work?
He gets good reviews from my friends. He’s now in Amsterdam doing the [Strauss] Alpine Symphony, we’ll do Ravel in Amsterdam and Paris. Maybe Brahms and Bartok in Chicago and Cleveland. We won’t get bored because we don’t see each other that much.
Your primary teacher at Curtis, Gary Graffman, was quite the Rachmaninoff specialist. You studied with him for five years, until 2008. But many of his ex-students go back to play for him at his apartment in New York. Are you one of them?
Yes, but he doesn’t say that much.
How is returning to Philadelphia, where you spent so many formative years at Curtis?
It’s like going home, just as it is when I go back to Beijing. I love Rittenhouse Square. I love playing for Meng-Chieh Liu [the Curtis chairperson of piano studies]. He’s amazing to play for. Very imaginative. And hilarious. I exact inspiration from where I am.
Yuja Wang and the Philadelphia Orchestra perform the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto Nos. 1 and 2 on Jan. 26 and Feb. 4, and Concerto Nos. 3 and 4 on Jan. 27 and Feb. 5, in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Streets. The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini appears at all four concerts. Tickets are $55-$249 (the usual $10 rush tickets will likely not be offered). philorch.org, 215-893-1999.
All five works will be performed at Carnegie Hall Jan. 28 on a single program (with two intermissions) beginning at 4 p.m. Tickets are sold out, but patrons may check availability at 212-247-7800.