Cellist feels the melody of home calling

Tickets for his recital at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center sold out within two hours.

He recalls that his father, who taught him the basics of the cello when he was 4, used to take him swimming in winter, at the outdoor diving pool located at today's Shanghai Symphony Hall. "It was bone-piercing cold," he says. "But it really benefited my health."

Wang moved to Shanghai from Xi'an, Shaanxi province, at 4, to live with his father who was a cellist with the yangbanxi (model play) troupe under the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre. It was, at that time, one of the most important cultural institutions in China, and it provided a venue where a large number of outstanding musicians, singers and composers could work together.

His mother, a flutist who graduated from the Xi'an Conservatory of Music, managed to join them in Shanghai nine years later.

To keep his toddler son company, his father borrowed a viola from a colleague, so that the boy could imitate him when he practiced on the cello. That was how Wang began to learn to play the instrument. The dormitory room where he lived with his father was so tiny that he had to practice in the courtyard.

When he was 9, Wang was enrolled into the primary school attached to Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He was an outstanding student, and was often sent to perform for important foreign visitors to the city. In 1979, Isaac Stern, a celebrated violinist from the United States made a historical visit to China. Wang saw him at school.

He had no idea whom the maestro violinist was, because at that time Chinese students only had access to classical music from Russia. He remembered the musician in an orange shirt, his face red from the sunburn, with a pair of glasses pushed to the forehead.

The boy only played a few stanzas when Stern called on the camera team to come over. "They rushed up, turned on the flash and while I played on, Mr Stern kept applauding, and saying 'bravo!'"

In 1981, the documentary about Stern's visit — From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China — was released and won an Oscar for the best documentary. Wang became known internationally as the child prodigy playing the cello with a big frown and his eyes often closed.