Yuja review – portrait of star pianist who is intellectually curious and deeply musically attuned

Musician is also rattled to find her appearance gets far more attention than her playing in this reflective documentary from Lorna TuckerAs well as her film about her own difficult teenage years, British director Lorna Tucker is probably best known for her documentaries on famous women with big personalities: Vivienne Westwood (Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist), Katharine Hepburn (Call Me Kate) and Greta Garbo (Garbo: Where Did You Go?). Her latest subject, pianist Yuja Wang, is another high-achiever – but not someone with quite the same name recognition unless you’re a devotee of classical music, a field in which she is ranked among the very best alive. Wang certainly has a flamboyant side, expressed in her highly expressive, virtuoso performances and her sartorial style on stage. In fact some shocking pull quotes illustrate how her dress sense has been bizarrely over-examined in the press; she has been likened to a stripper for her outfits, and the New Yorker, of all publications, once described her as “fat”, which hardly seems germane to any discussion of her ability to play Tchaikovsky or Ligeti.But Wang’s biography and the texture of her daily life are very different from that …

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