Pianist Yuja Wang at Verizon Hall

The pianist Yuja Wang bounds onto the stage with the energy of an ungainly antelope. She gives the audience a single hasty bow from the waist before sliding impatiently onto the bench. You expect her to attack her instrument with much the same sort of youthful vigor. But once she is into the first gentle notes of Schubert's Three Lieder a new persona emerges: The sound is so smooth— almost silken— that you forget that the piano is a percussion instrument.

Wang's subsequent program at her recital last week (works by Schumann, Scriabin, and Prokofiev) was designed to provide a showcase for a young pianist's versatility, but even in the most complicated and demanding works Wang's long bony fingers managed to summon forth exquisite music without the slightest trace of pounding. Her face and body betrayed no outward displays of passion or emotion— the sort of gimmick we've come to expect from, say, Lang Lang. She appears to be a totally unpretentious musician, utterly lacking in artifice of any kind, who communicates entirely through her instrument.

Isaac Stern, amended

In the 1987 film Distant Harmony, Isaac Stern remarked that today's Chinese violinists possess remarkable technique with Western music but lack the emotional rachmanes of, say, Jews from Odessa. Wang demonstrates how the world has shrunk since then. She has not only bridged East and West; she is an old soul in a young body, a native of 20th-Century China who at the age of 23 has somehow channeled the emotions of 19th-Century European masters.

Performers usually fall into one of two categories— artists and athletes— but Wang is both: You can watch and admire her dexterity and technique, or you can close your eyes and simply let the sound wash over you.

Graffman on Solzhenitsyn

As I watched and listened to Wang, I thought of something her Curtis Institute teacher, Gary Graffman, said some 15 years ago about another celebrated student of his. On the day Ignat Solzhenitsyn graduated from Curtis in 1994, Graffman pronounced him "a complete musician," even though Solzhenitsyn was then not yet 22. Today, of course, Solzhenitsyn makes his living mostly by conducting rather than playing. Precisely how Wang will improve and grow over the next half-century is a similarly fascinating question. Suffice it to say that Wang as a pianist has already supplanted Solzhenitsyn from my memory (I think her fingers are longer, too), and I suspect she will soon nudge Rubinstein and Horowitz aside as well.

Among many in the audience at Verizon Hall— which included Graffman, Solzhenitsyn, the composer Jennifer Higdon and numerous other Curtis alumni— there was a sense that we might just possibly be witnessing the best pianist who ever lived. What a shame, one audience member remarked afterward, that Schubert, Schumann, Scriabin and Prokofiev couldn't have been on hand to hear Wang's loving and intelligent revitalization of their works. But of course that's the inspiring thing about performance art: It's capable of being regenerated in each century by brilliant new performers, who find new twists in old works that never occurred to the original composers and playwrights themselves.

Yuja Wang gives us hope for the future. Oh, did I mention that she was recovering from a sore arm that forced her to cancel a concert the previous week?