Yuja Wang was born in Beijing, China on February 10, 1987. She entered the Central Conservatory of Music to study at the age of 9, under the tutelage of Professor Ling Yuan and Professor Zhou Guangren. She graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2008. She is a Chinese-American piano virtuoso. Since 1993, she has started learning the piano. In 1999, as an exchange student of the Sino-Canadian “Morning Music Bridge” cultural exchange project, she went to the Mount Royal Conservatory in Calgary, Canada to study.
In 2002, after winning the Grand Prize in the Concerto Group of the Aspen Music Festival in the United States, she entered the Curtis Institute of Music to study piano with Gary Graffman. In 2005, she performed Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 4” with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa conducted by Pinchas Zukerman. This was her first appearance in a large concert and was unanimously praised by the Canadian media. Since then, she has started to cooperate with famous orchestras in Baltimore, Beijing, Boston, New York and other places, as well as with maestros such as Charles Dutoit and Lorin Maazel. In 2006, she won the “Gilmore Young Artist Award”. In January 2009, the German record label Deutsche Grammophon signed an exclusive artist contract with her. From that year on, Yuja Wang has basically maintained the pace of releasing one album a year. In 2014, besides releasing her fifth album, she also gave 120 concerts around the world as a professional performer. She regularly holds solo concerts in Asia, Europe and North America, including participating in the Verbier Festival in Switzerland every year.
In January 2023, she played Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and “Rhapsody on a Paganini Theme” in four hours and thirty minutes, which was the first time in history that an orchestra and a pianist completed the performance of all five works in one night. Yuja Wang was rated by the British classical magazine Gramophone as one of the 50 greatest pianists of all time, and she is the only Chinese on the list.
On February 4, 2024, she won the “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” award at the 66th Grammy Awards, becoming the first winner from China since the establishment of this award.
