Forever young

Related: In the zone

Like anybody of her age, she loves social media and logs onto Facebook whenever she has time. She just watched the latest 007 movie Skyfall on the flight to China.

"Now I'm getting used to the crazy life of traveling around the world for some 120 concerts a year. I make new friends in many cities, and whenever I return they take me out."

She settled down in New York in 2009 and says the city is "a paradise for single people" because it has a "perfect delivery service".

The popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang (1920-95) once advised people "to be famous as early as possible." Obviously Wang agrees.

Born in 1987 to a musician father and a dancer mother, Wang began to learn the piano as a 6-year-old with professors at the China Central Conservatory of Music. She won several competitions in Beijing and had performed in Spain, Germany and Australia by the age of 9.

At 12, she won a scholarship and moved to Canada alone and then moved to Philadelphia to study with Gary Graffman, also the teacher of Lang Lang, at Curtis Institute of Music in 2002.

In January 2009, she signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon and became the third Chinese pianist to be signed with the renowned yellow label of classical music, after Lang Lang and Li Yundi. The International Piano Magazine called 2009 "Yuja's Year".

In the last three years, her fame rose dramatically and she has worked with many renowned conductors and orchestras.

"Charles Dutiot, Claudio Abbado, Gustavo Dudamel They are all great. It's very relaxed to work with the old maestros because they all love young soloists. You feel very safe, like in a car with an experienced driver. Playing with a young conductor like Dudamel is somehow a risk but exciting, like on a rollercoaster."

The cover of her new album Fantasia, her third with DG, features Wang wearing huge black wings on her back.

"To me, an angel with white wings is too bright. I am more like a witch, or a naughty elf. I like those tragic melodies or music with black humor," she says, adding that she likes Nietzsche and believes that the more tragic, the more hope.

At the NCPA, she played Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor - a favorite because "behind it is a tragic story". The composer wrote it and premiered it himself as the solo pianist to commemorate one of his friends, who committed suicide in 1913.

The new album features 18 pieces Wang usually plays as encores. She says it reminds her of that curious box she saw at the Palace Museum in Taipei. "You open it in different way to find different treasure," she says.

Contact the writer at chenjie@chinadaily.com.cn.