SFist Interviews Pianist Extraordinaire Yuja Wang

You were supposed to play your recital in April, what happened with the cancellation?

Yuja: I was just constantly playing concerts, and I had some physical injury, so I asked to reschedule it. I actually canceled the whole tour that week.

I don't want to push it, it's a long career I'm going to do with my hands so I just rescheduled it for [this] week.

Did you require special physical treatment?

Yuja: Hopefully, it's just because I played so much, and I have small hands. So constant stretching and forcing it, it's not too good. The important thing was to have time to relax and not do anything for the muscles to go back. And there's like acupuncture as well, that I tried and some massaging.

Would you change what you play, play less virtuosic pieces, to preserve your hands?

Yuja: Once it goes back, it should be ok. Because before that, I had a crazy schedule, I was playing a Bartok concerto and the two Rachmaninoff concertos, and then two different recital programs in like a week. It was just a little hard on the hands.

How many dates a year do you perform?

Yuja: More than a hundred.

How long can you stop playing without losing muscle stamina?

Yuja: Well I don't really practice that much anyway. And of course next week, I'm playing Ravel left hand concerto, so my right hand is resting.

What do you mean, you don't practice much?

Yuja: Of course, the more practice time the better, but I'm traveling so much, I'm just too busy.

You'll be playing Ravel concerto for the left hand: what would happen if you played with two hands? You did not lose an arm in the war...

Yuja: Ravel was commissioned, he wrote his piece for his friend who was injured in WWI, a great pianist who lost his right hand [ed: Paul Wittgenstein], so he wrote this concerto for the left hand for him. And it's such a masterpiece, people would not play it with two hands.

Part of classical music, as opposed to jazz or other music making, we are very loyal to the music and to the score. That's how the composer wrote it. And that's part of the challenge of this work. You have to make it sound like two hands. It's part of the challenge to make it sound that way. If you play with two hands,all the charm and difficulty and the history and the legend of this work is lost.

The program notes mention music-hall tunes and quotes a biographer of Stravinsky who said: "from this point, Stravinsky could have become Poulenc." You play Poulenc on the program, do you see the connection?

Yuja: Yeah, I'm going to one hand and two hands and then four hands. I don't really know the Poulenc yet, we're going to rehearse next week when I get in San Francisco, so I can't comment on the comparison.

Stravinsky of course is the greatest 20th century composer. I admire him greatly because of the variety of his music and his styles. This one for me, is really American, very jazzy, lots of syncopation, lots of show tunes, there's a cabaret feeling. The 2nd movement is very neo-classical. It's not the most virtuosic or audience pleaser concerto at all, but it's a fun piece and it's not played very often.

And to pair it with the pretty grim Ravel left hand concerto, it's a pretty good pairing, and it's all MTT's idea.

Playing 4 hands with MTT, is it how you share music usually?

Yuja: We always play like that for fun at home, he's quite a good pianist as well. It's the first time we'll play four hands in concert. I don't know the piece yet, I can't talk about it. For chamber music, lots of time, we don't learn the music until the last week. We're going to play with score, and we read pretty fast. So it's not unusual at all.

Your recital program puts the emphasis on virtuosity, doesn't it?

Yuja: It is. I start with Liszt's transcriptions of Schubert Lieder. I love Schubert's Lieder, and these three are the highlights out a few hundreds of them. The way Liszt elaborated is quite masterful, with lots of color, almost like a variation of the same stanza. The 2nd piece is Schumann's symphonic etudes, which is in the form of variations. The first half is more How a romantic composer used the form of variation to have inspiration. This year, it's Schumann year [ed: his 200th birth anniversary was last week], so I chose to play that piece. I never play Schumann in public.

The second half is two Russian composers: Scriabin and Prokofiev. Prokofiev hated Scriabin, and I chose some nice earlier works of Scriabin, which sound very much like Chopin. It's quite beautiful, and then I go to the heavy work of Prokofiev's 5th sonata. I love playing Prokofiev, I play his concertos a lot [ed: like last May here in SF]. I can see all elements of Prokofiev in this sonata. It has a Very machine-like drive. The 2nd and 3rd movements are like his ballet music, it's like Romeo and Juliette or Cinderella, and the outer movements are very wild with lots of sarcastic comments. It's a very hard work to make it work in concert, but it's such a great piece. After thirty five minutes, you can see how the motives work, the way he works with the motives reminds me of Beethoven, except for the fact that it's so long.

Congratulations on your Avery Fischer grant!

Yuja: It's like a competition like you won but you did not even compete, I don't know how that works but it's great. I wish everything worked out that way. It is recognition, and it's an honor to have that grant. It's not a huge change, I still have to keep playing and grow. But it helps a little along the way.