Thinking Big: Yuja Wang 王羽佳

She may be tiny in stature and on stage her slinky dresses are clearly meant to thrill. Once at the keyboard, however, the 30-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang cuts a seriously commanding figure who tackles the most challenging repertoire with fearless self-confidence and profound artistry. Wang is a sensational young player who seems to defy expectations at every turn.

她或許個頭嬌小，同時她那展露身材的舞台裝，擺明是要震攝全場的。不過，現年三十歲的中國鋼琴家王羽佳雙手一搭上琴鍵，便展現出一種睥睨天下的風采，以無所畏懼的自信與精湛的琴藝，克服最具挑戰性的曲目。轟動樂壇的年輕演奏家王羽佳，每個轉身，都出人意表。

• What is one to think of the clothes the twenty-nine-year-old pianist Yuja Wang wears when she performs—extremely short and tight dresses that ride up as she plays, so that she has to tug at them when she has a free hand, or clinging backless gowns that give an impression of near-nakedness (accompanied in all cases by four-inch-high stiletto heels)? In 2011, Mark Swed, the music critic of the L.A. Times, referring to the short and tight orange dress Yuja wore when she played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl, wrote that “had there been any less of it, the Bowl might have been forced to restrict admission to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult.” [Mark Swed 說的 18 禁那句話在這兒] Two years later, the New Criterion critic Jay Nordlinger characterized the “shorter-than-short red dress, barely covering her rear,” that Yuja wore for a Carnegie Hall recital as “stripper-wear.” [Jay Nordlinger 更誇張，說那件短得不能再短的紅色洋裝連屁股都差點包不住] 　Never has the relationship between what we see at a concert and what we hear come under such perplexing scrutiny. [這句是倒裝句，寫作可以學學] Is the seeing part a distraction (Glenn Gould thought it was) or is it—can it be—a heightening of the musical experience?
• During the intermission of a recital at Carnegie Hall in May, Yuja changed from the relatively conventional long gold sequinned gown she had worn for the first half, two Brahms Ballades and Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” into something more characteristically outré. For the second half, Beethoven’s extremely long and difficult Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat, known as the “Hammerklavier,” she wore a dress that was neither short nor long but both: a dark-blue-green number, also sequinned, with a long train on one side—the side not facing the audience—and nothing on the other, so that her right thigh and leg were completely exposed.