“Is this what you mean by ‘very Communist’?”

“Yeah. Because you have to go to Party meetings and talk about how to do well for society. Twenty-year plan. Five-year plan. You work for the common welfare rather than for the individual. Working for the individual is almost synonymous with being selfish. Which is not how I feel. I feel lucky that I came out when I was fourteen.” Yuja’s mother came for her graduation from Curtis and for her Carnegie Hall début; otherwise, Yuja sees her parents only when she performs in Beijing. She speaks of them in an affectionate but veiled way, always stressing their kindness.

When I asked Yuja to elaborate on her sense of the political differences between China and America, she paused before answering. After a while, listening to her, I realized that she was talking about an entirely different subject. I decided to persist. “I asked you about politics, and you have been talking about music,” I said.

“You noticed?” she said, laughing.

My visit to Yuja’s apartment had taken place after this conversation. It was around four on a hot August afternoon, and Yuja was dressed in denim shorts, very short ones, and a tank top. We had tickets to a five-o’clock concert of advanced contemporary music at Alice Tully Hall, and Yuja was debating whether to change for it. She rummaged through the suitcase on the floor and extracted two garments—strapless black-and-white minidresses made of a stretch fabric, called bandage dresses by their French designer, Hervé Léger, because that’s how they fit, and characterized by Yuja as “modern and edgy” as well as practical, because they don’t have to be ironed and lie nice and flat in a suitcase—and asked my opinion. Should she wear one of them or stay in the shorts? I asked what the issue was—was she interested in comfort or in how she looked? She stared at me as if I were crazy. What weird world was I living in where comfort could even be thought of? She wiggled into one of the bandage dresses, added her high heels, and we walked the three blocks to Lincoln Center at a brisk clip.

In February of this year, on four successive nights at Geffen Hall, Yuja played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat Major, the “Jeunehomme”—written when Mozart was barely twenty-one and considered his first masterpiece—with the New York Philharmonic, under the Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit. This was a departure for Yuja. Her career has been built on her playing of the Russian Romantics, the “red-blooded” and “hot-blooded” composers, as she calls them, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, for whose “passionate, emotional” pieces her short flame-red dresses seem to have been made. For a while, there was a picture of Yuja in front of Carnegie Hall in the flame-red dress she had worn at a recital in May, 2013, her arms raised high in the air in a gesture of culminating abandon. It stopped passersby. Now she was entering a new phase of engagement with Mozart and the nineteenth-century German classical composers. The picture of her in front of Geffen Hall was unremarkable.

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 cancelling 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?

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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.”