Pianist Joyce Yang will perform with the Omaha Symphony Orchestra in an all-Russian MasterWorks program Friday and Saturday at the Holland Performing Arts Center.

Yang, 24, and a native of Seoul, South Korea, has been performing since age 12 with the likes of the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hague (Netherlands) Symphony Orchestra.

In Omaha she will play Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the lush composition presents some uncommon challenges.

“You start on a theme everybody knows,” Yang said. “Rachmaninoff builds on this theme by putting 24 variations to it. Each variation grows out of the one before.” And each variation is beautiful and worthy of attention.

“I really need to think about a larger picture and not necessarily indulge in each passage,” she said. “There are so many gorgeous moments that I want to indulge in it and not think about the bigger picture. (But) I need to think about the big picture and where the climax is. I want the audience to feel like they’ve been on a journey and not that they have seen 24 different depictions of the same object.”

Guest conductor Andrew Grams will be at the podium for the concert. This will be Yang’s first collaboration with the Omaha Symphony and her first time working with Grams as a conductor.

She planned to arrive in Omaha on Wednesday for two rehearsals with the orchestra.

“When I play with a new conductor and a new orchestra, it’s really hard to tell how it’s going to go,” Yang said earlier in the week from her home in New York City. “The orchestra is going to respond to me and the conductor is going to respond to me, especially with Rachmaninoff. One starts the sentence and the other finishes it.”

Yang first came to the United States in 1997 with a plan to stay for a year of training in the pre-college division of the Juilliard School in New York. She won a competition that led to her performing the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra when she was just 12. She signed with a manager and she has been performing ever since. She was the silver medalist at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Yang has performed about once a year in her native South Korea.

“When I come back, it’s like a big wedding without a groom,” she said. “Everybody I know will show up and I’m in a gown.”

The MasterWorks program on Friday and Saturday will also feature the orchestra, without Yang, on Shostakovich’s thundering Fifth Symphony and Borodin’s Overture to Prince Igor.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1052, jane.palmer@owh.com