Nobody's Looking at You Read online

  A day before the first concert of the series at Geffen, I attended an open rehearsal at the hall. The Mozart concerto was on the first half of the program, to be followed by Respighi’s orchestral pieces Roman Festivals, Fountains of Rome, and Pines of Rome. The Respighi pieces were being rehearsed first, and when I arrived at the hall, around noon, much Respighi remained to be played. Yuja was waiting in the small room upstairs where soloists change clothes and receive visitors. She showed me a closet where the three dresses, designed by Roberto Cavalli, she would wear at the concerts were hanging. I took an immediate dislike to one of the garments—a short pink dress with black swirling lines on its gathered skirt and bodice. It was neither ultra-short and tight nor long and clinging. It was a kind of girlish summer dress. I did not like the idea of Yuja wearing it onstage. The two other dresses were a glamorous dark-blue long gown and a short, also concert-worthy dress.

  Yuja curled up on a sofa—she was wearing tight-fitting black leather trousers—and laughingly recalled a newspaper headline she had seen during a tour: “‘Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Wunderkind.’ Isn’t that an oxymoron?” she said. I had arrived early at Lincoln Center and stopped into a café for a sandwich, though not so early that there was time to eat the whole large overstuffed thing. When I offered Yuja the half sandwich the waiter had wrapped, she accepted. Predictably, she opened the sandwich and ate the chicken, then the tomato, then the lettuce, and then—unpredictably—the bread.

  Dutoit, a tall man of seventy-nine, appeared with his fourth wife, Chantal Juillet. After husband and wife hugged Yuja, Dutoit stood back to look with elaborate mock lecherousness at her tight trousers. Dutoit and Yuja go back a long way. The infamous habit of Dutoit’s second wife, Martha Argerich, of canceling concerts at the last minute had given Yuja one of her early breaks. Argerich was one of the stars Yuja replaced while she was still a student at Curtis; Radu Lupu, Yefim Bronfman, Evgeny Kissin, and Murray Perahia were others. (“With Martha it was like, ‘I’m tired … do you want to play with the Boston Symphony for me?’ And I’m like ‘Of course!—Wrong question!’” Yuja told an interviewer for the Australian magazine Limelight.) Yuja’s ability both to learn fast and to turn the disgruntlement of audiences into amazed delight did not go unnoticed. “By the end of the final movement”—of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1—“the audience stood and roared,” the Philadelphia Inquirer critic David Patrick Stearns wrote in a review of the concert at which Yuja replaced Argerich.

  After some cheerful banter, Dutoit left to rehearse the final Respighi, and Yuja excused herself to warm up in a large adjacent room that had a piano. She preferred that I not go into the large room with her but didn’t object to my staying in the small room, where I could hear her play phrases over and over and feel that I was uselessly eavesdropping on coded artistic secrets.

  At the concert proper, the following night, Yuja wore the glamorous dark-blue gown, and played with delicacy and beauty. She and Dutoit and the orchestra were in elating rapport. The first cadenza produced one of those you-could-hear-a-pin-drop hushes in the sold-out hall. She had gone very quiet, and the audience followed as if mesmerized. No one coughed.

  “Who can play Mozart the way she did?” Graffman said afterward. “It was so natural, in such good taste. Not that she was doing anything. That’s just the way it came out. Who can do that and also play the Horowitz Carmen Fantasy?” In The New Criterion, Nordlinger wrote, “Mozart ends with a rondo—and it should be fast, exuberant, and fun. It was. Wang ripped the notes out of the keyboard, as much as played them. At one point, I almost laughed out loud. That’s how funny she was, and how funny Mozart is.”

  Yuja must have liked reading this. She had once talked about how funny Mozart is: “Mozart is like a party animal. I find I play him better when I am hung over or drunk.” At the same time, she saw Mozart’s music as “noble, tragic, like a great Greek play. The human emotion is there but with a lot of godliness in it.” On the second night, my heart sank when Yuja walked onstage in the pink dress. Was it my imagination or was her playing less inspired than it had been the night before?

  Meeting Yuja in the Sky Lounge a few weeks later on a rainy day, I told her of this impression, and she did not contradict it. “Because of that dress, the little pink one, because it’s so different from everything I’ve ever worn, I didn’t really feel myself, and maybe that came through. I liked the pink dress because it was different. Sometimes, the difference might become the style of my next season. It could be what’s going to come. Or it could be something to discard. You don’t know until you try it.” She added, “They wanted to put in social media that I was dressed by the designer Roberto Cavalli.”

  “Were you feeling something related to the dress while playing?”

  “No, not while playing. Just when I walked onstage. This was a cute little pink dress, and I thought, It’s not me. It’s about a young girl. Just the opposite of the nude dress.”

  In 2014, when an interviewer from the London Telegraph asked Yuja about “her fondness for riskily short, clingy dresses,” she gave a flippant reply: “I am 26 years old, so I dress for 26. I can dress in long skirts when I am 40.” But in fact Yuja’s penchant for the riskily short and clingy has less to do with allegiance to the dress code of her generation than with an awareness of her own “super-smallness,” as she calls it. She knows that small, tight clothes bring out her beauty and large, loose garments don’t. But she is not just a woman who knows how to dress. She is a woman who is constantly experimenting with how to dress when she is playing on a concert stage. She is keenly aware—as many soloists affect not to be—that she is being looked at as well as listened to. Reviewing the Carnegie Hall recital Yuja played in May 2013, Zachary Woolfe wrote in the Times, “I confess that while perhaps 90 percent of my attention was on her precise yet exuberant playing, a crucial 10 was on her skintight flame-colored dress.” Woolfe went on to brilliantly anatomize the experience of simultaneously listening to and looking at Yuja: “Her alluring, surprising clothes don’t just echo the allure and surprise of her musicianship, though they certainly do that. More crucial, the tiny dresses and spiky heels draw your focus to how petite Ms. Wang is, how stark the contrast between her body and the forcefulness she achieves at her instrument. That contrast creates drama. It turns a recital into a performance.” When Yuja played the Jeunehomme in the girlish pink dress, that contrast was absent. The sense of a body set in urgent motion by musical imperatives requires that the body not be distractingly clothed. With her usually bared thighs, chest, and back demurely covered by the black-splotched pink fabric, this sense was lost.

  Yuja’s customary self-presentation as a kind of stripped-down car is, of course, only one way of appearing onstage to artistic advantage. When Maurizio Pollini plays in some nondescript suit, his body-aliveness is no less present for us. Martha Argerich’s widow’s-weeds black gowns heighten the beauty and mystery of her playing. Plainness is never a mistake on a concert stage. For the two remaining Mozart performances, Yuja, realizing her misstep, returned to the designer she regularly uses.

  The “nude dress” was a long gown (in recent years, long gowns have been admitted into Yuja’s concert-clothes closet, but they have to be slinky) made of body-stocking fabric with sparkling encrustations at bosom and stomach and a long swishing skirt. Yuja wore this fabulously gorgeous costume at the third concert—which had the electricity of the first one—and felt comfortable and happy in its defiant sexiness and her feeling of nakedness.

  * * *

  I looked out the window of the Sky Lounge and saw the New Jersey shoreline disappearing in a gray mist. Yuja herself was in a dark mood. She had recently returned from a European tour and was exhausted and dispirited. In Munich and Paris, she had played the Mozart piano concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic, and the reception had been only okay. A blog about the Paris concert saying “Yuja Wang disappoints” had stayed with her. She paraphrased its words: “‘She didn’t have emotion. S
he’s not yet mature enough to play Mozart.’” She went on, “With Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky I can blow them away. ‘So amazing, so impressive!’ But I went for the surprise, for the unexpected. I ask myself, Am I playing for the applauding, for the standing up, or am I playing because I really like something in the music and I just want to play?”

  She talked in the same dark vein about her personal life. She spoke of the “too many people” she meets on tour: “Who are your real friends? I naturally give my love and friendship, but once the tour is over are they really your friends? What’s always there, of course, is music. The other things come and go—except maybe your parents.” She laughed. “And Gary.”

  Gary Graffman, who is eighty-seven and now retired as the head of Curtis, and his wife, Naomi, who is eighty-eight, are Yuja’s best friends in New York and perhaps in the world. Graffman, you may recall, is the distinguished pianist whose career was disrupted in the late 1970s, when he lost the use of his right hand. When I visited the Graffmans in their apartment at the Osborne, on West Fifty-Seventh Street, they spoke of Yuja as of a beloved granddaughter of whom they are so proud they can hardly stand it. When I asked Graffman how she compared with the other prodigies at Curtis, he said, “She was remarkable among remarkable students. She didn’t play like a prodigy. She played like a finished artist.” Naomi recalled that when Yuja first arrived at Curtis, Gary asked her to take the new student to lunch, and she dutifully did so. “By the time lunch was over, I thought she has to be at least thirty-five or forty,” Naomi said. “She was speaking so intelligently about so many things.” Yuja was fifteen and a half.

  * * *

  As Yuja had been a musical wunderkind at six, at twenty-nine she is a kind of existential prodigy, already undergoing the crisis that ordinary people undergo in midlife. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-nine years. Do I want to go on doing it, or is there something else waiting for me?” She spoke of her sense of alienation from people who don’t have to constantly and relentlessly study music and practice, of feeling like an outsider, sometimes even “I don’t like to say but almost like a prisoner. I haven’t ever enjoyed my free time. It’s always like I am challenging myself. I must be a little masochistic.” She would see people walking in the park on a beautiful day and long to join them. But by the time she had untied herself from the mast of her art it was midnight, and there was no one to join her in a walk in the park.

  At the “millennials’ parties” she had attended on the last two nights of the Mozart concerts (their purpose was to encourage young people to go to concerts), she had wearily answered questions from a stage. “I would have enjoyed these parties five years ago,” she said. “I still enjoyed them. They were fun. Nice people. I had lots of drinks. But I get the same questions again and again. It’s like water goes into the same spot. And then I become a little unpleasant. And then I feel guilty that I was unpleasant. They ask me things like”—she began speaking in a mocking singsong voice—“‘Are you single?’ ‘How do you memorize your pieces?’ ‘How do you pedal with your heels?’ ‘Who do you buy your dresses from?’ ‘Why do you wear short dresses?’ ‘Why do you wear long dresses?’ ‘Why do you have short hair?’ ‘Do you like traveling?’ ‘Why don’t you play more Prokofiev?’ ‘Why do you play Mozart?’”

  The room had darkened, and everything on the river was disappearing. When I drew Yuja’s attention to the apparition of the sublime in the window, she was looking at her phone. “I’m just checking,” she said. “I’m not being impolite.” Yuja treats her phone the way almost every young (and not so young) person today treats it—as a transitional object. She and I have corresponded by email (largely about chocolate), and her messages are filled with emoticons and LOL-like abbreviations. In deference to my age, she does not text me.

  When I commented on her melancholy, she denied—and then acknowledged—it: “It’s a very depressing thought. Just touring and playing—the same things or different things. But in society people don’t allow you to be sad or depressed. It’s like a bad thing. It’s why I’m antisocial. I feel this negative energy. ‘She just complains a lot.’ Excuse me, that’s part of what I do. You feel all these things. As a musician, you probably feel them more intensely. But society wants me to be happy. My parents. They are the most unintrusive parents. ‘I don’t care what you do—just be happy.’” She made an urrrgghh sound and laughed.

  * * *

  Yuja has made changes in her professional life that she is not sure have solved the problems of doubt and restlessness by which they were impelled. Last year, she abruptly left her manager, Earl Blackburn, of the large Opus 3 Artists agency, with whom she had been since she was sixteen, and joined Mark Newbanks, whose London-based agency, Fidelio Arts, has only three other clients—but what clients!—the conductors Gustavo Dudamel, Lionel Bringuier, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Although Yuja doesn’t speak of it in such terms, the change of managers has the atmosphere of the dissolution of a marriage: a young wife leaves the dull, older husband for an exciting younger man. Naomi Graffman spoke of Blackburn’s extraordinary devotion to Yuja: “He coddled her as no one had ever been coddled before. Every little thing she wanted or needed, he did it for her. He would brush her teeth for her if she wanted.” The younger man is different. He does not take Yuja’s clothes to the cleaners; recently, he did not offer to pick up a Russian visa for her, as Blackburn would have done. “She was furious,” Gary said. “Never having had experience with anybody else, she thought that was what managers did.” I happened to have heard about the Russian visa from Yuja. She had not mentioned Newbanks, just the fact of this and other annoying little errands she had to run, followed by the playful question “Shall I hire a boyfriend or an assistant?”

  I proposed a boyfriend/assistant. Earlier, she had spoken of the obstacle her touring schedule put in the way of lasting romance. The boyfriend/assistant—i.e., a muse—would always be in the next seat on the plane. “No,” she said, “guys won’t do that. It’s okay for a woman to do that. It’s harder for guys to get rid of their egos, to be even a little bit subservient.” She added, “Of course, I want guys who are successful. Which means that they have their own work, that they’re busy—and that I am the one who visits them.”

  I asked if her romances were with artists of her caliber.

  “Not of my caliber,” she said without hesitation (and the obligatory peal of laughter). “I never meet people of my caliber who are available.”

  She talked of the older and old people with whom she feels happy and comfortable (the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is a kind of runner-up to Gary Graffman in the lovable-mentor sweepstakes): “people who have their whole life behind them”—as opposed to the young with their oppressive burden of futurity. Another older friend, Emanuel Ax, invited her for Thanksgiving last year, and she accepted, but in the end did not go, preferring to “be home and snuggle up and watch Netflix.”

  She spoke of leaving Earl Blackburn not regretfully, exactly, but with a kind of cold wisdom about the possible pointlessness of the gesture that people three times her age don’t often achieve. “There was nothing wrong with the old manager. He really built my career. He was really caring. But I was, like, if I don’t make a change, I’ll never make a change. I’m bad at confrontation. So I just did it out of the blue. But nothing much has changed. It’s a little better here and there. But it’s still the same circus.”

  * * *

  When I met for coffee with Newbanks—a suave, slender, elegantly dressed man of forty-eight, a former cellist—he told me that his aim as Yuja’s manager was to cut back on her engagements and “put air” in her schedule. “She had three days free when I met her—that’s impossible.” Another goal was to steer her toward experimentation with repertoire, and one of these experiments has already taken place—in March, Yuja played for three nights with the New York Philharmonic in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, conducted by Salonen. Turangalîla is a thrilling, mad, loud piece that features two solo
instruments, the piano and the ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument that makes unearthly wavering sounds not easy to hear over the orchestral pandemonium. Yuja’s playing was brilliantly audible. She played from a score, and on the night I attended did her own page turning, which lent a certain suspense to the proceedings. The pages flew at a rate of about one every thirty seconds. Would they lie flat? Page turners usually give a little firm pat to the page they have just turned to make sure it will stay in place. Later, Yuja told me that she had put adhesive on the pages to ensure that they would stay in place.

  Newbanks said that it is customary for management to take 20 percent of a soloist’s fee and 15 percent of a conductor’s fee. I asked him, as I had asked Yuja, what her fee was, and, like her, he wouldn’t tell me. “No one in the business talks about it,” he said. The business evidently exacts a vow of omertà from its members. Newbanks laughingly (perhaps a little nervously) said that Yuja had alerted him to my unseemly interest in money. When I put the futile question to her, she had answered, “I don’t usually like to talk about fees,” and added, with uncharacteristic humorlessness, “I feel it is degrading to art to measure it with money.”