Ryan Wang gently pressed the piano key with the ring finger of his right hand and then sat motionless, his head bowed, his mop of thick black hair nearly covering his eyes. He held the note for what seemed like an eternity. As the sound slowly faded through the ornate School Hall at Eton College, the audience waited in silent anticipation.
This was Ryan’s last performance at Eton, a place he’d called home for the past five years. He’d arrived at this elite English boarding school, a short walk from Windsor Castle, as a 13-year-old boy wonder from Vancouver who’d played New York’s Carnegie Hall, performed for the prime minister at the time, Stephen Harper, and appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show – all before the age of 6.
He’d finished his last exam a few days earlier and then headed across town to play a few selections for King Charles III and Queen Camilla at the castle.
Ryan performing at a music recital put on by Eton College at St George’s Church Hanover Square in London, January 2025.Eton College/Supplied
The summer ahead was already packed with concerts in Britain, France, Italy and Sweden. He’d also made the finals of the famed International Fryderyk Chopin Competition, which starts on Oct. 2 in Warsaw. It’s only held once every five years and a win there would put his career on a stratospheric level.
But on this warm Sunday evening last June, Ryan put all of that out of his mind. He was bidding farewell to Eton with a starring role in the annual spring concert, a tradition-filled event that’s led by student musicians and ends with the audience singing school songs in Latin.
The hall was packed and so hot that school masters allowed the boys to take off their tailcoats. Ryan ignored the rare dispensation. In a tribute to his love of the place, he walked on stage in full Eton attire: black tailcoat, black waistcoat, white shirt and white bow tie.
The 100-member student orchestra accompanied him through Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and after a tumultuous ovation Ryan returned for an encore, which he’d kept as a surprise. The hall fell quiet as he took his seat in front of the polished Steinway and launched into a soulful rendition of Franz Liszt’s Liebesträume, or Dreams of Love. As he held the final notes, he closed his eyes and looked upward. “I felt so nostalgic,” he said afterward. “It’s a very bittersweet piece and fitting.”
Ryan with his mother, Iris, before a recital in the London-area home of Kumi and Lionel Smith-Gordon. The couple host regular classical music performances, managing the proceeds through a charity they launched that supports musicians.
Ryan plays Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28 during an interview near London on Sept. 9.
Who knows where prodigious talent comes from. Some say it’s God given or sealed in genetics. Others say it’s a skill that can be taught and honed through countless hours of practice.
Ryan doesn’t fit many moulds.
His dad is a fisherman while his mom worked at BC Hydro and then stayed home to take care of Ryan and his younger brother Michael. The Wangs – Iris and Justin – immigrated from China more than 20 years ago and pooled their resources with relatives to buy a house in West Vancouver.
Ryan performing at a charity concert in 2012.Ryan Ni/Wang Family/Supplied
Ryan started begging his parents for a piano when he was four years old. Iris balked at first. She knew Ryan had been hanging around their neighbour’s home, fascinated by the beautiful sounds their piano made. Iris thought his interest would fade but she agreed to buy a small keyboard to keep her son happy. That wasn’t enough and the pleading continued.
Iris finally relented and bought a piano from a local music store. She was so unfamiliar with the instrument she had to ask the shop owner to recommend a teacher.
Iris and Justin never had to push their son to practise. If anything, the toughest punishment Iris could mete out was threatening to revoke Ryan’s practice privileges.
Ryan appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show in 2013.Wang Family/Supplied
Within 18 months of instruction, Ryan was cleaning up at major competitions. One top honour earned him a slot at Carnegie Hall, and social-media stardom followed when a clip of him playing in New York went viral. That led to an appearance on the Ellen show at the age of 5. He charmed the host by saying that playing the piano was “just in my memory. I just love it and then sometimes it just goes to my fingers.”
Iris still had no idea what to make of her son. “I asked his piano teacher, ‘How talented is he? I’m not a musician, I want to know.’ And she told me, ‘Very talented.’”
Soon the invitations to perform were pouring in from around the world and Iris knew it was time to get serious about Ryan’s ability. She convinced Lee Kim Sing, a renowned pianist in Vancouver, to instruct the young prodigy.
Then at 12, Ryan announced he wanted to attend Eton.
His family had never been to Britain and knew nothing about the school, or its 600-year history of educating royals, prime ministers and captains of industry. Ryan had just been captivated by what he’d seen online.
He had to audition for the one music scholarship Eton awarded annually to a promising talent who hadn’t already been admitted to the school. After a long week of hopefuls, Ryan was the last candidate to audition. He selected Chopin’s Polonaise, Op. 53.
“We were absolutely blown away,” recalled Eton piano instructor Gareth Owen, who was on the judging panel that day. “It was such a high level of playing that we wondered whether he was a one-trick pony and that was the only piece he could play. So, I said to the others, ‘Well, if you can play one piece like that you can probably play a lot of other pieces to that level as well.’ So, yeah, he had a huge impact straight away.”
Eton awarded Ryan the scholarship and Owen took him on as his prime pupil.
Child pianists, even exceptional ones, are often overly developed technically, Owen explained. They know the notes and can play almost anything proficiently, but they lack the understanding and the feeling of the music. Ryan was different.
“He has a very, very instinctive talent for just making a beautiful sound,” Owen said. “He doesn’t really get in the way of the music. He plays and it just flows through him.”
Under Owen’s guidance, Ryan’s talent blossomed. In 2022 he won the prestigious Samson François International Piano Competition in Nice, France. That led to an invitation to do an artistic diploma at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He spent two years travelling between Eton and Paris, and finished with the highest marks in the French school’s history.
His fame hit new heights in 2024 when he won the BBC Young Musician Award, a six-month-long contest held every two years that involves more than 300 participants from a variety of musical backgrounds.
Ryan seeks an emotional connection to the pieces he’s learning.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine Ryan as anything other than a gangly teenager with a blob of unkempt hair on top of a wiry frame that hasn’t filled out. He loves basketball, cheers for the Golden State Warriors and enjoys hanging out on his father’s fishing boat.
But whenever the conversation turns to music, he becomes reflective, thoughtful. No one can live without music, he said earnestly. It’s all around us. “Even silence is music.”
He can still remember his introduction to notes and melodies, and how that made him feel. “My mom brought me to baby music lessons and I really loved this idea of being able to create something beyond words,” he said.
Listening to his neighbour tickle the ivories gave him an instant love of the piano. “For me, the piano is the most touching instrument.”
He doesn’t like to spend hours and hours practising, fearing it might dull the inner freshness he wants to bring to each piece. Instead he’ll take a walk, clear his head and think about connecting to the piece emotionally.
“I think some pianists, they practise until they don’t have to think. But for me, I use my brain, so my brain tells my hand where to go, and then my hand does it,” he said. “My old teacher always said, ‘Our fingers are blind, deaf and stupid.’ So we have to navigate, and we are the driver.”
Ryan after performing at the Vancouver Charity Concert for Richmond Hospital in 2016.Wang Family/Supplied
Each new piece is an exercise in self-exploration. “You have to really strip yourself bare, and you have to really reflect upon yourself. So in a sense, more thinking than execution. That’s why I think just that mentally practising as well is so important.”
Playing works by his favourite composers – Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven – “is just an outpouring of your own emotions and what you think the composer has done to enrich your own life and your experiences.”
But there’s another side to Ryan too: a fierce competitiveness and ambition that burns just beneath his mild-mannered demeanour.
When the BBC Young Musician Award got down to the three finalists – Ryan, violinist Shlomi Shahaf and pianist Jacky Zhang – Ryan refused to budge when he picked the same piece as Zhang to play in the final broadcast, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
BBC producers were flummoxed. This was the first time in the competition’s 46-year history two finalists would play the same work and they worried about how that would look to the huge television audience. They pleaded with Ryan and Zhang to select something else. Ryan wouldn’t back down. “I believed I could play it better than him,” he said.
The jury named him the winner, in a unanimous vote.
Classical music critic Christopher Axworthy fondly recalled the first time he heard Ryan play. It was during the Montecatini International Piano Competition in Florence in 2023. “They were playing nicely, lots of the people. Then suddenly, Ryan came on,” Axworthy said. He dashed off a note to one of the judges that read, “Finally, an artist.”
“It was just so obvious when he touched the piano. You can’t teach that. You are born with that talent. You can kill it. And it is killed off by a lot of teachers who try to conventionalize it and put it in a picture frame,” he added.
Canadian pianist Ryan Wang plays Chopin’s Waltz op 34 no 1 in A flat major during a recital near London, England on September 10. An earlier version of this video incorrectly named the music as Étude in A minor, Opus 25, No. 11 (Winter's Wind).
On a sunny Monday morning in August, Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall was filled to capacity as Ryan strode on to the stage.
The 200-year-old venue used to be a church and it still evokes a kind of godliness with its raised wooden platform where the pulpit once stood and its horseshoe-shaped balcony where the faithful sat enraptured. Nowadays it’s the site of morning recitals during the annual Edinburgh International Festival.
Ryan wasn’t feeling well. He’d picked up a cold on a recent trip to Boston where he’ll be studying next year in a joint program at Harvard University and the New England Conservatory. He wasn’t sure how he’d get through the program, consisting of more than two dozen of his favourite works by Chopin.
As he sat on the bench, he tucked a small grey facecloth into the side of the piano to wipe away the sweat already flowing from his brow.
Iris paced the floor of a room backstage, fretting.
She’s a constant presence in Ryan’s life these days, smiling and clapping at every concert and making sure his tie is straight and his suit is pressed.
Like any mother, Iris Wang worries about Ryan's health, his sleep and his diet.
Even though Ryan boarded at Eton, Iris rented a flat around the corner from the school, just to be close to her sons (Michael is also an Etonian and plays cello in the orchestra).
Since Ryan graduated this past June, Iris has kept meticulous track of his performing schedule and made sure he got to each venue on time.
Like any mother she worries about his health, how much sleep he gets and whether he’s eating properly. Just before one concert outside London, she rushed off to buy sushi to make sure her son didn’t play on an empty stomach. Later when he grumbled about how much stage time he was getting at a coming festival, she offered consoling words in a mix of Mandarin and English and pointed out that his performance was actually longer than he’d realized.
Iris has no interest in being her son’s manager. She was thrilled when he signed a contract last spring with London-based HarrisonParrott, one of the world’s largest agencies for classical musicians.
Ryan is now represented by London-based HarrisonParrott, one of the world’s largest agencies for classical musicians.
She prefers to stay in the background when Ryan speaks with adoring fans, sponsors or concert promoters. She’s on a journey too. Always learning more about the piano, classical music and her son.
As he sat in front of the keyboard steadying himself with his hands on his lap, most of the 900 people jammed into the Queen’s Hall weren’t sure what to expect. Many had heard about Ryan from the BBC contest while others came to see if this teenager could really play. The timing of the recital – 11 a.m. – made for an informal atmosphere and while Ryan was dressed in a black suit and tie, some of the audience were in T-shirts and shorts.
As soon as Ryan hit the first notes, they were enthralled. He played the selections flawlessly and returned for three encores as the applause rained down. His final encore was Beethoven’s Für Elise, done in a ragtime style, which prompted waves of laughter.
“It was unbelievable,” said Bernard Clow as he filed out of the hall. “I’d never heard of him. I think he’s an absolutely brilliant young man.”
Backstage, Ryan wasn’t happy. He told his mom he could have done better. “I told him, ‘You played very well.’ But his expectation on himself is very high,” she said.
Ryan is one of 85 pianists heading to Warsaw for the International Fryderyk Chopin Competition.
Ryan turned 18 in August, no longer a child and now a professional pianist with an agent and concerts booked through to Christmas.
Soon he’ll be heading to the International Fryderyk Chopin Competition. He was among more than 640 pianists who entered the competition; 85, including Ryan and four other Canadians, made the final, which runs until Oct. 23.
“Warsaw is notoriously known for being the most stressful competition in the world by miles,” Ryan said. “All I can do is try my best and love the piano. And hopefully the piano loves me back.”
Despite all the accolades and all the pressure, there’s still a kid lurking inside. The one who posts funny videos of himself playing blindfolded or doing a rendition of Billy Joel’s Piano Man, complete with a harmonica, while playing a video game at the same time.
Ask him what he’ll be doing in five years, and his eyes bulge at how far away that seems. He hasn’t even gotten used to being out of high school.
Then he turns serious. “Just being able to truly enjoy and love music, just for what it is. Yeah, that’s what I hope I can do.”