In tune and top of her game

Wang Yujia plays with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Harding in Beijing. China Daily

Pianist will play 'hardest concerto'

Heavy metal magic

On the second evening, she and the London Symphony performed Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No 2.

The Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev piano concertos on her Beijing programs are the two pieces she played most last year. In February 2013 in Caracas, she performed the two demanding works in one concert with Gustavo Dudamel's Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. The concert was recorded live and released by Deutsche Grammophon.

"It was my first visit to Caracas. It's so adorable, lovable and warm, and I don't just mean the weather," she says, "Everything feels very spontaneous and that totally fits my temperament. You know, I even had two bodyguards because they said there might be danger, but I did not feel any danger at all.

"The piano was not that good, but the orchestra was terrific. We had so much fun, because they are all around my own age, which does not happen often. What really stuck me is how responsive they are. In the rehearsals I found that if I asked them to do something in the music, they'd not only do it at once, but they'd do it about a thousand times better than I'd imagined. I could feel our heart together."

She once dreamed of recording the two piano concertos she loves most with Claudio Abbado's Lucerne Festival Orchestra, but sadly the maestro passed away in January.

Dudamel is another conductor she enjoys working with. They were aware of each other before they met, and had hoped to work together some day. According to Dudamel, the opportunity came sooner than expected.

"It came about as if by magic," the Venezuelan conductor says. "Our schedules looked really full, but I was in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl and they said: 'We have a soloist you might be interested in'." And so, in summer 2012, Dudamel conducted Wang in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1.