One fine number

NEW YORK - Pianist Yuja Wang often seems to be stalked by fame.

No matter how casually she appears to have wandered into a brilliant international career, Wang, now 23, began landing major concert opportunities at 16 while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. Cut to last year, when she made her recordingon the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label and won her first Grammy nomination. Then she parachuted into the 2009 Lucerne Festival opening-night concert playing Prokofiev under the magisterial baton of Claudio Abbado - while attracting "best new artist" titles like a magnet. And she's accomplished all this without a major competition prize (although studying at Curtis under the well-connected Gary Graffman didn't hurt).

"Lots of fashion people want to dress me in concert," Wang said the other day in New York, where she now makes her home. "We're living in a commercial world. It's inevitable that this is going to happen. But it's not going to enrich me, it's going to distract me. Music is my main interest, and as long as I keep that going. . . ."

A pity, in a way, given her fashion-model silhouette. "But you always have to wear their dress," she said. "It's a commitment. And I just don't want to commit."

Her stubborn independence, keen observational powers, and hunger for discoveries come as no surprise to those who watched Wang during her Curtis years (2002 to 2008). In a world where concert programs are etched in stone a year in advance, her Kimmel Center recital on Thursday is fluid. She announces composers but decides only in the weeks before the concert what speaks most to her. As of late last week, her Web site and the Kimmel Center's disagreed on what she would play Thursday.

Though Chopin is one of her core composers, she turned down some July concerts in her native China because of an all-Chopin stipulation. She doesn't take orders well. "So I'm going to play three recitals in Taiwan," she says. "I'm sure they won't like that."

Outwardly, there's nothing defiant about Wang's easygoing, laughter-prone manner - belying a penetrating sadness in her eyes that suggests the price of such independence. Having been a star student at Beijing's Central Conservatory, she immigrated to the United States at age 14 without the usual protective parents in attendance. Though Curtis assigned her a surrogate family to which she grew close, she mostly lived on her own in Philadelphia.

Wang creates family around her: When on tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields a few years ago, she loved being part of the band. Mostly, though, she travels alone, and is one of the few young musicians to do so. "Nobody wants to come with me," she says. "Nobody can keep up with me!"

She seems rather waifish to be a road warrior - or an interpreter of leonine Russian repertoire. "One stupid reviewer said, 'She looks like she could barely hold a cup of tea,' " says Wang. "They don't understand how I could look like I'm 15 and play these big Russian pieces."

Siding with the Philistines, one has to wonder how she produces that sound. "It's the intention of wanting so much sound," she said.

An anatomical answer, please? "There are so many ways of playing piano. My mom is a dancer. For her, the physicality of playing the piano is rooted under the feet," she said. "Later, it went up here, to the diaphragm. 'Loud' is not what I'm looking for, but to have a nice sound. . . ."

Wang shocked National Public Radio listeners by saying she doesn't necessarily love her chosen instrument, but that's not quite what she meant. She's about self-expression, and piano happens to be her best way of achieving that, especially since she learns repertoire far faster than most of her colleagues - and thus can spend much time pursuing her interests in visual arts and church architecture. To cope with constant pressure, she convinces herself that her career is an extremely important hobby - a virtuosic rationalization in the face of a schedule that barely gives her consecutive days off. "This is a mess because I said 'yes' to everything two years ago," she moans.

Certain mentors keep her inner life rich. Though her off-podium dealings with conductor Abbado (who conducts her next CD, of Rachmaninoff concertos) are limited given his post-cancer state of health, she counts her time with him in Lucerne as one of the best periods of her life. Whenever possible, she works with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who suggests such offbeat repertoire as the Stravinsky Capriccio and gives her entire residencies, to play concertos with his San Francisco Symphony plus chamber music with him.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's chief conductor, Charles Dutoit, is a tougher mentor. When she asked if he'd coach her on Liszt's Sonata in B minor, Dutoit pelted her with questions: Had she looked at other editions of the piece? Had she read the Faustian literature that inspired Liszt? Wang came back having read Goethe as well as Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. "I was very touched that she made that effort," Dutoit said.

Ultimately, her greatest resource is herself. The most distinctive performance on her new CD Transformation is Scarlatti's Sonata in F minor - a brief, songful work she infuses with a melancholy that couldn't have come from historic research. Where did such a complete and convincing remaking of the music come from?

When she plays the piece, Wang explained, she's 13 again, practicing for what she knew was her last recital in China before going to North America to study. She remembers the smells of her Beijing home, the bleak yet cleansing rain that day, her frustration at not coming to terms with the sonata and wanting to be outdoors and beyond her inner struggle.

Struggle, she now knows, is her friend. "The more comfortable I am onstage, the more the performance turns out good but nothing special," she said. "When there are so many things I wanted to do but didn't get it, when I have that unattainable feeling onstage, people go crazy."

As for her outer life, she jokes that she would rather have a dog than a boyfriend. But with her travel schedule, a boyfriend is more viable, hers being New York Philharmonic trumpeter Matthew Muckey, whom she has nicknamed "M&M." Her own preoccupation with creating a high-quality sound is reflected by her description of his: "The way he plays, it's almost like an oboe, it's so melodic and lyrical." The loneliness of separation is eased somewhat by one of his bon-voyage gifts - a laptop with Web cam.

In her 4 a.m. moments, though, she is most haunted by the aggressively forthcoming generation of Chinese pianists, among whom the trailblazing Lang Lang is considered passé.

"Generation after generation, they just get better and better. That's an inevitable fact," she says. "It's all about the subconscious mind. If you've heard the Brahms second piano concerto when you're 12, it's different from having heard it when you're 4. They take it in at such a young age. And it grows. . . .

"One of these days, I'm going to be the old one."