On the surface, Xiayin Wang’s first recording, recently issued by Marquis, is a fairly typical debut disc, showing off her talents in a historically wide-ranging repertoire, from Bach to Gershwin-Wild. Yet the mini-recital of Scriabin at its core gives the recital an atypical flavor—and, as became clear during a conversation in New York in September, Wang is hardly a typical pianist.

She’s fortunate to have had a double training, having been educated first at the Shanghai Conservatory (from 1989 until 1997), and then at the Manhattan School of Music (where she is currently completing her doctorate). I was curious about her Chinese training—given the effects of the Cultural Revolution, how did China manage to build up such superlative teaching institutions so quickly?

“During the Cultural Revolution, there were definitely limitations. Not many foreigners came in to give master-classes, to give a course, or to do other things like that. A lot of people went to Europe or came here to study. And then, after the Cultural Revolution, they went back and started teaching in the Beijing Conservatory or the Shanghai Conservatory. Every single teacher that I know, 99 percent of the teachers, went to foreign countries to study for a bachelor’s or some kind of degree and then came back to teach.” Although the situation has changed now, “at the beginning of the Shanghai Conservatory, they would not allow you to teach if you hadn’t been to a foreign country.”

Even though her Chinese teachers were Western-trained, she’s noticed a fundamental difference in approach now that she’s come to the United States. “In China, the teacher is dominant, 100 percent. Over here, the teacher has 70 percent of dominance; the student has the rest. That’s the difference, good or bad.” Certainly, her Chinese training cemented her technique: “The good thing in China is discipline. You definitely have discipline. Every single week you have a concert you have to attend that counts for credit. And every single semester there is a jury, like a piano exam. And repertoire, the teacher decides: you listen to your teacher about how to play it.”

Is that kind of rigor better than the freer system in the States? “It was good for me,” she says. Starting with “constant intensive training” at a young age, is crucial. The same training at a later age does not produce the same effect: “I’m learning more and more slowly because I am getting older. I do feel the difference.” But that kind of training requires external pressure. “As a kid, you are not going to have discipline no matter how much you love music. The parents, the teacher have to sit next to you. My mom sat next to me every single hour. That’s very normal in China. She took notes at every single lesson. I still have those notes. And if I didn’t have the discipline from the teacher and my mom always telling me, ‘Practice, practice, practice, practice,’ I would not have gotten to this point.”

But she’s also come to realize that the Chinese conservatories—at least when she was there—had a very different notion of repertoire. In one sense, it’s very broad. “I played basically everything. In China, you will see a very typical concert. It will start with Bach, and then Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn, and then Chopin and Debussy.” At the same time, the Chinese notion of repertoire has limits: “When I was there, there was not much contemporary music, and I still imagine now that there wouldn’t be too much contemporary music.” It has only been in the States that her repertoire has expanded. In China, “contemporary music was a very small portion of my life. I have to open it up a little more. Because that’s going to be the fashion. A lot of people would like to hear new things. The ears get very tired with Chopin all the time.” Programming new music is especially important if you’re interested in attracting younger audiences: “The younger generation likes contemporary music a lot, and so I should catch up.”

In the United States, her first contemporary piece was George Perle’s Toccata. “My teacher gave it to me six or seven years ago. He gave me two weeks to memorize it and everything. The first week I went to the lesson, I didn’t have it, I didn’t even have it in my fingers. ‘Come back next time. Don’t even stay here, there is no point. Take it as medicine. I know Chinese medicine, how bitter it is.’” Contemporary music is “a very different thing, but the more you do it, the more familiar it becomes—to the fingers, to the brain system. So it should come along. I feel that my 10, 10 and a half years in America have taught me a lot. My whole being has just opened up so much because this is a different place, a different culture, different customs here. That helps me a lot with my playing.” She’s particularly grateful to her sponsor, William Schwartz: “Without him I would never be here today.”

One can also see a significant difference in the attitudes of her Chinese and American teachers toward recordings: “In China the teachers encouraged the students to listen to recordings before they learned the pieces. That’s what recordings were for: to learn the style and everything. It’s the ear—the ear learns it first. It’s just like dictation: I say something and you repeat, it comes right away. But when I came here, the teachers would not encourage you before you learned the pieces, only after, because then you don’t copy anything, you learn it with your own understanding.”

Listening to Wang’s CD, with its remarkable sense of ease, you’d think she was a pianist who never ran into serious difficulties. But in fact, she speaks with refreshing frankness and eloquence about her frustrations: “Sometimes I’m just—I know it’s probably technical problems, but I get very upset. I have small hands. Some repertoire I could never play, like Pétrouchka. But also in Scriabin there are a lot of big jumps everywhere.”

But the real problems are not physical: “I should not blame it on my hands. Patience and a lot of practice will solve the problem.” Rather, the abiding problems are interpretive. When we talked, she was preparing for a Scriabin recording session with Naxos. “Right now, I’m dealing with Scriabin. I have an issue with him, sometimes I can’t understand why things are written like this or like that. I try to make it make sense, but sometimes I don’t feel that I can grasp what he is trying to say. That happens a little bit with any composer, it depends on what piece. But with him, there is so much information. It’s compressed and you have to digest each single note, each single chord, each single chromaticism. If not, I think, ‘Why am I playing this?’ With me, I have to understand it totally.”

Still, whatever the frustrations, in both her playing and in her conversation it’s the joy of music that stands out. What does she like most about being a pianist? “So many things. It’s difficult for me to explain, but I see myself through piano. I am lucky that I can express myself, speak about myself very clearly through the sounds of the instrument.” Her enthusiasm is almost palpable when she talks about her debut CD. “It’s great to put different pieces together, the pieces you think you’re best at, and put it on the CD.” La valse is her favorite work on the recital. “I just love this piece; I love the harmonies, I love the dance rhythms. It’s definitely a very big and strong piece. It’s also very ‘me.’ I have confidence in this piece.”

Besides its extreme technical difficulties, La valse also has significant textual problems, since in the score of the piano transcription itself, Ravel included, in small notes, a large number of extra details from the orchestral original. Pianists usually take these additions into consideration, but different pianists incorporate different details: “Everybody has their own version, everyone has a different approach. Some people think, ‘Oh here I want to have it very dry. I don’t want to have more notes.’ They probably don’t use anything extra from the score. Or some people think, ‘Oh here I would like to add more, because it’s time.’ It’s very interesting: people decide according to their understanding of the piece.”

So how did she decide? “At first, I listened to people, having people giving me suggestions. Then I listened to the orchestral version a lot, because that’s where you’re going to get your ideas. Then I use the piano as much as possible to create the same kind of impact you get from the orchestral version.” Whatever you can say about her version, it’s certainly not dry. She admits that “to play everything is probably impossible at such speed,” but she nonetheless “tried to put in as much as possible, to keep the main melody there, but to try to make it sound fuller, as much like the original as possible.”

Yet while La valse may be her favorite piece on the program—the piece that most represents who she is—it’s obvious that she has a special affinity for Scriabin as well, especially for Vers la flamme. “Vers la flamme: this is my Scriabin. This is him. That’s definitely the essence of Scriabin. This mood fits me the best and I can definitely make it happen.” What’s the mood? “It’s dark, unpredictable, a little bit evil. I am very nice, but I like the—I do taste the evilness in the piece. I mean for somebody to think that the earth is going to be destroyed! . . . But it’s just so dark and he succeeds. This piece goes from here to here: the whole piece is basically one dynamic sign, crescendo always.

“Ravel never went to atonality. But Scriabin definitely did, creating a new sound to the ears, creating new techniques. He’s very inventive. Ravel’s colors, though, are amazing. He can surprise you with incredible technique of mixing different colors together. The colors are different with Ravel and Scriabin. I am so lucky to like both.”

Our conversation turned back to the upcoming Scriabin recording, to include, among other things, the Fantasy and ops. 32, 34, 41, and 56. “The repertoire was actually limited because Naxos does not duplicate anything, so I had to go over all the repertoire lists of Scriabin to compare with the repertoire that they have.” The CD will include re-recordings of the Scriabin material from her Marquis CD, but, as she puts it, they won’t be quite the same. “I play differently now. I already performed those three again, in July; I think I’m just discovering more beauty and different things. I just feel that I have a different point of view now. I don’t know exactly what changed, but I think it’s a little bit more mature—I feel better now with those three pieces that I played.” Can she specify any of the differences? “It’s definitely darker. I think that’s what he’s trying to do, to present that kind of mysterious . . . There’s a lot going on, and sometimes the changes of harmony are very touching. He’s a Russian composer, but it’s a different kind of Russian—nothing like Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff’s right out there. With Scriabin, you really discover more and more how sad it sometimes could be.”

I asked her what pianists she admires, and the answer was telling. “I admired, and still do, Horowitz and Rubinstein. But then I asked myself, am I actually admiring the person or a specific performance, a specific recording? Not every single performance of Horowitz was on top. So I started just listening to recordings without knowing the names, and that’s good. And I can like the recording, no matter who. I also get inspired by younger pianists, even elementary school students. Sometimes elementary school students can play so well, their techniques are amazing. Now the younger generation, it’s incredible when I listen to some people play. Wow! None of my colleagues could play like that at that age. Now they’re getting just better and better and better.

“I listen to other instruments as well. I listen to a lot of strings. It’s something the piano cannot do, but string-players can definitely inspire my emotions with their vibrato and their different techniques. And singers too.” In particular, after recording Brahms’s First and Third Piano Quartets for Marquis (with Bela Horvath, violin, Tom Palny, viola, and Raphael Dube, cello), she started listening more to violin music and to chamber music. “It is educating me from a different angle, teaching me how to approach a note. And I can give myself goose bumps.”

I tried getting at the “favorite pianists” question from a different angle: if she had a chance to have a master-class with any pianist living or dead, who would she choose? The answer was immediate: “Horowitz. Definitely. There is so much heart. I would totally go with the idea that you play music with heart. I’m nobody to judge, because I’m not old enough. But I know that I hear people play piano or play other instruments with no feeling about it. ‘That’s it, I’m just playing, I have the technique, and boom: I have facility.’ But that’s not the point. Technique serves the heart. Technique serves the music. It cannot be any more important. You have to have technique to be able to express, but if it’s just technique it’s going to murder the audience. It’s just not right to do that.”

Scriabin’s op. 32/2 contains the marking con fiducia—with confidence. And if there’s one quality that marks this recital, it’s Wang’s youthful confidence: not arrogance, not self-importance, not haughtiness, but a sense of poise that gives an unpretentious clarity to all of this music. Wang’s tone is not huge (certainly, her Vers la flamme doesn’t match Horowitz’s for sheer mass). But she does coax a great deal of refined color from the instrument (the Scriabin is especially rich in timbre), and her technique is unfazed even by Ravel’s extravagant demands, made all the more extravagant by Wang’s own textual decisions.

Not surprisingly, given the post-Romantic slant of the album, her Bach is on the pianistic side, especially in the haunting account of the second movement. Similarly, her Mozart—shorn of repeats—is more notable for suppleness than for Classical astringency. But while her warm-hearted readings appear little influenced by period-performance practice, there’s nothing maudlin here—warmth never degenerates into slush.

That said, I suspect that most readers will find the 20th-century music to be even more attractive—her elastically phrased, velvet-toned Ravel, which builds to a kaleidoscopic climax; her ecstatic performance of the Scriabin Waltz; her glowering Vers la flamme; and, perhaps best of all, her impassioned accounts of two of Earl Wild’s etudes on Gershwin. Wang speaks in her interview about the importance of “discipline,” but it’s clear from these performances that she’s referring to the kind of discipline that liberates, not the kind that enslaves. For while the playing never seems approximate, it nearly always feels spontaneous.

The sound is excellent too—and although there are no notes about the music, I suspect that the pianophiles most likely to be attracted by this recital don’t really need them. All in all, a succulent introduction to a pianist well worth watching.