Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, who was born in 1987 in Beijing, began piano studies at the age of six and went on to study at the Beijing Central Conservatory. At 14, she moved to Canada to attend the Mount Royal College in Calgary. The following year, she studied with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she received her degree in 2008. Already in 2003 Yuja Wang made her debut playing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, and in 2005 she made her debut at the National Arts Center Orchestra in Ottawa under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman. Appearances have since followed with almost all of the eminent American ensembles, including the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She participated in the New York Philharmonic’s high-profile tour of Japan und Korea under Lorin Maazel, she has appeared with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov in Great Britain and the Netherlands, and hse substituted for an ailing Murray Perahia to play with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in its United States tour in 2008. As a recitalist, Yuja Wang has appeared at the Aspen, Gilmore, Santa Fe, Schleswig-Holstein, and Verbier Festivals, and she has also concertized in Washington, D.C., Chicago, London, Paris, and Munich. In the 2008-09 season she turned her focus toward Europe, appearing with the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas and touring with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Charles Dutoit through Belgium and Spain – as well as performing with the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA under Claudio Abbado. In April 2009 Yuja Wang released her first CD, on which she plays works by Chopin, Ligeti, Scriabin, and Liszt.
This concert marks Yuja Wang’s LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut.