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An archetypal wunderkind, Wang started playing the piano at age of six, on an instrument that had been given to her parents as a wedding present. Her father is a percussionist and her mother a ballerina, who would take little Yuja along to rehearsals of Swan Lake, where Tchaikovsky’s score tricked into her ears and sparked an early passion for the Russian Romantics, whom she described as “masters of emotional manipulation.” However, she adds, “Chopin was my first love – I just felt his music was so alive. I felt I knew this – person in my soul.” She also recognised something in the “compactness” of his work that chimed with the ancient Chinese poetry she was starting to study at school. “But every composer opens some new part of the heart or lights up a certain part of the brain with the things you cannot communicate in words,” Wang says. “Music is more direct transmission.” At the age of seven, she enrolled at the Beijing Central Conservatory before moving to Calgary, in Canada, when she was 14 to attend the Mount Royal University Conservatory. In 2003, she went to America to study at the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, graduating five years later. Although she started winning major prizes from the age of 11, Wang is dismissive of classical music’s competition circuit. “Competitions treat making music like playing sport,” she says. “Yet it is not a sport – it’s all subjective. When I started out doing competitions in China, I wanted to focus more on the performance than the winning. Subconsciously, I was already preparing for a career.” Wang got her big break in 2007, when she stepped in as a last-minute replacement after the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich cancelled a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She went on to make her Carnegie Hall debut in 2011. By 2012, the San Francisco Chronicle’s critic was declaring her “quite simply, the most dazzling, uncannily gifted pianist in the concert world today.” Flipping through later reviews, you’ll find praise of her “fearsome fortissimo,” “liquid phrasing,” “mischief,” “nuance,” “delicacy,” “joy,” “ravishing elan” and “unfathomable dexterity.” Does she ever think that audiences who come to her are already so convinced of her brilliance that they wouldn’t notice if she has an off night? “Yeah!” she laughs. “Sometimes I am like: Did you hear that? I was really s---!” She dissolves into rebel giggles and adds that it’s often the simplest pieces that earn the loudest applause. “I am just laughing,” she says, “because something like the Philip Glass [Etude No 6], that’s a piece I can sight-read and memorise the next minute. It’s super easy, not requiring any of my effort, really. But every time I play that piece, people go apes---for it.” Listening to her speak, you get the sense that the audience doesn’t always live up to her high expectations of them, mistaking the darkness in which they sit for a cloak of invisibility. “Music comes from silence, but I can hear them coughing, unwrapping candy,” she says. “I know it’s probably so sensitive to say, but that’s insulting to me, because if you are really gripped by something, then you don’t cough, you don’t unwrap candy. You do that when you are bored.” She says that being a solo pianist can be lonely. “If you are a solo violinist, you can go and discuss bowring with the rest of the string section. For me, I have to take a book to rehearsals. The piano is isolated, so you’re an outsider, a star that music shines alone.” When Wang is not on the road, she lives alone in New York. “For a while, she was linked to Klaus Makela, the 28-year-old- Finnish conductor who is one of classical