Classical Sessions: Wang Yuehan

Pianist Wang Yuehan has distinguished herself as a performer with a particular interest in early pianos and historical instruments. Prior to the birth of the modern piano, the construction, sonic properties, and performance demands of keyboard instruments were vastly different from those today—which is why Wang finds them fascinating. For this exclusive Classical Session for Apple Music and Apple Music Classical, Wang has selected four pieces she has loved since childhood for their intense beauty. They also demonstrate the huge changes that keyboard music went through during the time from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor in the late 18th century to Schubert’s Impromptu in A-flat Major in the mid-19th. In the years between 1798 and 1835, the piano evolved from a Classical instrument constructed around a wooden frame into the metal-framed instruments of the Romantic period. Her instrument of choice for this session is a Romantic-period piano she recently acquired—an 1819 Graf replica. “The 1819 Graf was made just before that transition and possesses both the transparent clarity of the Classical period and the lush beauty of the Romantic,” Wang says. “When I was preparing for this recording, I experienced even more clearly the immense power of the instrument to shape the aesthetics of the music.” She reveals, too, that her piano is being heard for the first time in this Classical Session. “I hope that these wonderful pieces of music, the sound of an early 19th-century piano, and the stamp I’ve put on them can continue to create new stories,” she adds.