STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Joyce Yang’s aunt put Joyce’s piano under lock and key when Yang’s parents gifted her with the piano for her fourth birthday. Little by little, she opened it up to teach her little niece. And within a few years the young girl from Seoul, South Korea, was making a name for herself as an international piano star.

Yang, who took home the prestigious Van Cliburn silver medal at 19, kept a full lecture hall at The Community Library chuckling Wednesday night as she recounted her journey to piano stardom with Sun Valley Music Director Alasdair Neale.

The Upbeat with Alasdair conversation took place ahead of the three free Sun Valley Music Winter Festival concerts featuring Joyce Yang and Sun Valley Music Festival Chamber musicians playing works by Rachmaninoff, Schumann and others through Saturday, March 8, at The Argyros in Ketchum.

The Grammy-nominated pianist, who curated this week’s Winter Festival, has performed with the Sun Valley Music Festival twice before.

Yang told her audience that her parents were not musical—her father was a chemical engineer and her mother a molecular biologist. They owned two CDs and never went to concerts. But they gave her a piano because her mother’s sister had decided to begin teaching piano and they thought it would be good for Joyce to be her first student.

Yang watched as the white piano rolled into the family living room.

“My aunt would make a sound and I’d repeat it and, as I progressed, she started to forget the lock,” she said. “My aunt introduced a new world to me.”

Yang said her aunt is currently teaching only 4-year-olds, and they don’t even realize they’re learning piano. They think it’s a wildly fun experience.

Yang said her aunt will tell her students that a composition is like a hamburger, with one half of the bun being part A; the patty, the middle of the piece, and the second part of the bun, the end. As a piece gets more complicated, she adds cheese and lettuce.

She encourages proper hand positioning in the young ones by making them cup their hand to form an igloo and telling them that the hand has to remain round so the penguin can find its home. If the kids relax their hand position, she tells them the penguins are suffering and, immediately, they bring their hands up.

The kids are playing recitals after eight months.

“She says, ‘Oh, if I taught you now, you’d be so much better!’” Yang laughed.

Yang said her aunt created so many small concerts for her to be part of from the time she was 4 that she didn’t get nervous performing in public.

“I knew what goes on in a concert. I knew that, when there’s an audience, things are different and, if I didn’t practice, I’d panic. I quickly figured out that I need to practice so I don’t mess up on stage.”

Still, she said, she experienced some butterflies when she entered her first competition at 7.

“I started, and suddenly I was done, and I began crying.  I told my mother, ‘I don’t remember anything that happened.’ ”

When Yang was 9, her mother took her to play for a woman at a lunch party. The woman, it turned out, was from the prestigious Juilliard School of Music.

“She told my Mom, ‘You should bring her to New York—I can get you an audition.’ I said, ‘That sounds like fun,’ having no idea what an audition or Juilliard was,” Yang recalled.

Yang did accompany her mother and aunt to New York where she wondered why she was getting all dressed up in the middle of the day. Juilliard wanted her to start right away but Yang’s mother replied that it would take two years for her to arrange a year-long sabbatical.

Yang returned at age 11 and it was there in a sound proof room that she learned to listen to the different inflections of music. She’d spend an hour playing one note, listening to how it sounded as she made such subtle changes as pressing the piano pedal halfway down. Her instructor showed her how to use her arms and back so she wouldn’t injure her fingers during 10 hours of practice, thereby avoiding having one finger collapse in the middle of a concert as happens with some pianists who put too much pressure on their fingers.

She enrolled in fifth grade at a public school on Long Island, knowing little English save for a few phrases like “I want an apple.” And she looked forward to getting up at 5 every Saturday morning to take the train to the city to be at Juilliard by 8.

At 12, as she was finishing her year, she won the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, performing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. And she received a call from a music manager.

“Mom said, ‘We’ll stay a little longer and we will try a new thing where you travel a little and play,’ ” Yang recounted.

For the next six months Yang traveled the country playing at important venues with national symphonies. Her father faxed her a poem he’d written her every morning in the days before emails.

“What a great sacrifice my parents made. This flipped my family dynamic upside down,” she acknowledged. “Now, my parents both live in New York City after being apart 15 years, and my mother found a new job in cancer research. But there were other kids like me so I thought it was pretty normal. Yeah, a pretty normal childhood, actually.”

At the suggestion of her instructors, Yang spent a grueling 10 months learning two sonatas, two concertos and two chamber pieces to compete in the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

There, she learned the value of teamwork with chamber musicians when members of the Takacs Quartet told her, “If you want to do something a little extra, we’ll be there for you.”

“It was like me falling back and they were there to catch me. It changed chamber music for me,” she said.

Yang won a silver medal at the competition and took home Best Performance of Chamber Music and Best Performance of New Work.

Winning the Cliburn award changed everything as she was suddenly faced with performing 60 concerts a year, instead of 10.

“As soon as they put the silver medal around your neck, you get your schedule for the next four years. It’s like, ‘You asked for it. Here it is.’ I had to fulfill both the Cliburn concert dates and mine.”

Yang was a sophomore at Juilliard when “the madness started,” so it took her five more years to finish her degree instead of three. But she graduated with special honor as the recipient of Juilliard’s 2010 Arthur Rubenstein Prize.

Since she was gone performing five days every month, it meant being one-on-one with a tutor 12 hours a day learning music theory, keyboard skills and score reading, which involved reading 12 lines at a time. She also learned how to accompany singers and how to change the key.

“I learned through listening, not reading, music, so reading was difficult for me,” she said. “And, as a classical pianist, I’m obsessed with why a composer wrote a particular note. I can’t improvise. I can only play what’s on paper so improvising for me is like jumping off a cliff with no parachute.”

Yang said that solo recitals are the most uncomfortable for her.

“Speaking alone on stage for two hours is difficult. It’s much more fun when you can bounce off others,” she said. “In chamber music, a handful of musicians come together to rehearse to become a one.”

One of the first pieces you learn as a kid is Mozart, but if you miss one note it’s equivalent to missing a hundred notes—you never recover, she said. Playing Rachmaninoff, by contrast, is like a Christmas tree with 10,000 lights--if you miss a few, you really don’t notice.

She said she doesn’t remember venues as much as the pianos she plays: “A piano is 75 percent, acoustic 25 percent. A hall can be glorious but, If I have a bad piano, bad hall.”

Yang, who now lives in Irvine, Calif., where her husband performs for the Pacific Symphony, said she never felt like she had to play piano forever.

“But I liked it so much it became part of me,” she said.

And, after even all these years, she still has some things yet to accomplish: “I have yet to learn Brahm’s Second Piano concert. It’s sacred in my mind.”