Lebrecht Column: Wang Yujia at the Crossroads

Norman Lebrecht Shi Xichen/Translation

A young woman walks onto the stage, wearing a long backless skirt that slits to the base of her thighs, or a miniskirt that is one inch below her hips. Yes, I've become a fashion critic, and when those statements are made public, I'm being slaughtered on social media because I'm committing unforgivable straight male cancer and focusing on what female musicians wear rather than her performances.

Yuja Wang

My defense against this is that Wang Yujia did her best to attract attention to her appearance. During the intermission of the concert, she habitually changed into another costume to further show off her legs, and she posted a large number of selfies in crop tops and ultra-shorts online. Type "Wang Yujia" on your phone and you'll be able to see it all. However, under the current rules of speech, this should not affect our judgment of her identity and achievements. So, let's break this taboo and find out.

The first thing I would like to state is that if Wang Yujia was not an outstanding pianist who was breathtaking in his interpretations of late modern music and postmodern music, I would not waste space here. She played Prokofiev with a courage that russians envied, and when she played LiGeti, she played with a wit that was unmatched by Hungarians. When society returned to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic, she was the most popular star of top music performance agencies. At the reopened musical gala at Carnegie Hall, Wang Yujia won the brightest star seat instead of Lang Lang. Her rise was so rapid. Top record labels like Deutsche Gramophone obeyed her. If she wanted to play Stockhausen on a Spinner, it would sell out in a few hours. She can do whatever she wants. So why did she use her naked skin to distract her attention from music?

A relevant factor may be the speed with which she gets ahead. Growing up in a well-established family in Beijing, she was admitted to a conservatory at the age of 9 and moved to Canada at the age of 14 to study English. Gary Graffman, the venerable Curtis College in Philadelphia, accepted her as a disciple, just as Lang Lang had been with him before, though the two were extremely different. Lang Lang is a natural artist, and Wang Yujia just wants to get on stage, play quickly, and then leave. She discovered slim-fitting costumes created by Canadian costume designer Rosemarie Umetsu (who also custom-made costumes for Lang Lang), which may have given her the confidence to go back and forth between flash and encore.

Her first appearance came in March 2007, when Marta Agridge, who had cancelled her performance on the boston bench, played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto; two years later, at the chaebol-backed Lucerne Festival, she got a second chance when Claudio Abbado fell out with a famous soloist and tried to find a submissive replacement. By the time she was around the age of 25, Wang Yujia was already an elite artist, despite being in a confusing environment. She shuttles from one agent to another, flying from a business hotel to a big-name music festival, and she has no time or guidance to develop her opinion. Wang Yujia is like a cat in five-inch Louboutin high heels on a summer night, an unstable loner wandering on the classical music stage. When asked what friends she had, she could only mention the immortal Grafman.

To reporters who asked about her clothing, her response was that "young people just wear it that way." She is not good at giving interviews, and seems easily bored or extremely naïve — which may be a distraction strategy, a means of covering up Wang Yujia's true image. She once teased The Observer's Fiona Madoc: "If music is beautiful and sensual, why not dress it up?" It's about power and persuasion. Maybe it's a little bit of my sadomasochistic complex. However, if I'm going to be naked while playing music, I might feel comfortable being in it too. The Freudian writer Janet Malcolm met her several times over the course of a year to write character close-ups for the New Yorker and noticed that she had tendencies to depression.

The music discussion was quickly reduced to "philosophical nonsense" (as she said). Composers were dismissed with clichés — Prokofiev was "a naughty kid," "I've given up scrap wood Schubert," "Mozart was like a party animal." Some people thought her brazenness was cute, but her peers weren't cold enough to attract them to her concerts. Older people will only find this kind of wit annoying.

If Wang Yujia only has these things, her artistic career will not come much. Now 34 years old, she already needs to consider shelf life. Fitness and makeup can extend it for a while, but not beyond 40 years. She needs to find a new dimension, to find proof that her soul transcends its body. This summer, she tried Mozart's Concerto, all the notes like a white colt crossing the gap, without a trace of depth. What she needed was time and space—time with Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and perhaps waste Schubert—and the content of his late sonatas was much richer than the audience's satisfaction and admiration on the spot. As for space, a rest period should be arranged.

Wang Yujia could be said to be at a crossroads at this time. Conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Janik Nej-Segun, and Charles Dutoy saw her as a temporary female companion in music. The music industry sees her as a holiday accessory. She couldn't afford to change agents again. She needs a complete change of dress.

Imagine this: If Wang Yujia walked onto the stage of Carnegie Hall wearing the kind of robe that Mitsuko Uchida had thrown away that covered her shoulders and wearing a pair of shoes that sold for less than the monthly income of laborers, there would be an exclamation from the crowd, stemming from the impact of this new look. The track list was changed at the last minute, with the insertion of three sugar-free versions of Beethoven's mid-term sonatas. Without the addition, critics could not get a light laugh by writing words like "The Emperor's Concerto Without Clothes." If Wang Yujia wants to strip everything away for the sake of music, I have a feeling that she can really make a splash.

Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming

Proofreader: Ding Xiao