In January 2023 at Carnegie Hall, Yuja Wang played all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos plus the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening, paused for 20 minutes while medics treated an audience member who collapsed, then sat back down, finished the marathon, and played an encore. This episode traces how a pianist builds that kind of bulletproof focus, starting with a girl in Beijing in 1987 who chose the piano over her mother’s dance ambitions because she preferred to sit down.

We follow her from the Central Conservatory at seven, to Canada at 11, to the Curtis Institute at 15 where Gary Graffman recognized intellect and taste rather than mere mechanical speed, and to the 2007 night she replaced Martha Argerich with the Boston Symphony and became famous overnight. The conversation covers her Deutsche Grammophon contract, her strategic pivot from Russian thunder to Mozart’s transparency, the 2011 Hollywood Bowl review that obsessed over her orange dress, and her recent moves into leading the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard, a podium debut at the Colorado Music Festival, a David Hockney Lightroom collaboration, and a VR project called Playing With Fire built around a Steinway Spirio player piano and custom fragrances.

• Why playing one Rachmaninoff concerto is normally a season’s centerpiece and what five in a night demands physically
• The difference between a typist and a poet, and how Graffman spotted an interpreter rather than a prodigy
• How tackling Mozart proved she had no blind spots and could not be dismissed as a powerhouse without nuance
• Why the classical concert functions as a 19th-century ritual and how her wardrobe disrupts it
• What holograms, player pianos, and scent say about the future of live performance and the human element that cannot be digitized