SF Interviews Piano Sensation Yuja Wang

Yuja Wang will dazzle us this week at Davies Symphony Hall, playing the dastardly difficult Prokofiev piano concerto #2 with MTT. Here she plays the concerto's scherzo with the YouTube symphony orchestra. She is all of twenty-two, but already acclaimed as the future of classical music. She has performed with the San Francisco symphony three times already, earning accolade galore from the critics: "an artist of dazzling genius," says the SF Chronicle, surrounded by "an aura of greatness...Wang combines a practically superhuman keyboard technique with artistic eloquence that is second to none." That is some serious hyperbole to put on the shoulder of such a tiny "sparrow, (a very pretty sparrow)," drools the LA Times.

You get it, she is one not to be missed. Add to the mix the world premiere of The B-Sides by East Bay composer Mason Bates (known also as DJ Masonic), a piece partially performed at Carnegie Hall with the YouTube Symphony which you can view here. Pretty exciting stuff all around. So we called Yuja to ask her about YouTube, Prokoviev and MTT, after the jump.