This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube interview-style excerpt (title: '#pianopodrewind 🎹 Breaking barriers at Carnegie Hall!', published 2025-01-20) featuring two speakers—an interviewer and a concert pianist. The pianist talks about balancing pregnancy with an active performing career (including an upcoming Carnegie Hall appearance), describes her artistic mission to spotlight underrepresented repertoire and creators (women, artists of color, queer and emerging composers), notes commissioning over 30 new works and 250 world premieres, and references her recent album 'Dreams Unveiled' which debuted at #2 on the Billboard classical charts.
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Or if they do, that it's, that it's, wow, she was pregnant and she's still having her career. She's still herself because I am. We all are, whether we choose to have kids or not, or whether we choose, however we choose to dress or what, you know, we're still, it's just choices that, you know, that are contribute to us as opposed to take, they're not, they're not separate from who we are. It's part of who we are. So I will have a bump at Carnegie Hall. So any New York listeners, you will see it loud and proud on the Carnegie Hall stage.
Oh my goodness, I'll be there, I'll be there. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I can't wait. So before getting into more details about your work and career, let's just start with this. So, you know, your concert pianist career is blossoming, remarkable, and from this past fall season, your groundbreaking album of Dreams Unveiled. I love that album so much, and which debuted at number 2 on the Billboard classical charts.
That was very exciting.
And then commissioning over 30 new works and performing in over 250 world premieres. So you've made a profound impact on the classical music world. So if you were to capture the essence of your artistry, maybe you already have, but a mission and passion in just a few sentences, sort of like, uh, introduce yourself to my audience, and how would you define who you are as an artist today?
Oh gosh, that's so hard, right? First, I just want to acknowledge how hard it is to talk about the work we do, right? It's, it's putting it into words when it's something that's so intangible is very hard. So let's— I'm going to frame it and say what makes me— what I believe makes me unique. And that doesn't mean that there aren't other people out there doing it, because there are a lot of people that are, that are doing this work now, which great. But, um, my artistic mission is to cast light into the corners of the classical music— still classical music, but the classical music repertoire, field, realm, stage, whatever you want to call it— where light doesn't get cast enough. So for me, that's the work of women, past, present, future; the work of artists of color, past, present, future; and then the work of creators in general who can't be put in a box. Maybe they're queer artists, maybe they are young artists, you know, they're emerging artists. I hate that word. We're all— I'm still an emerging artist.
Me too.
Exactly. I hope that my wish for everybody is that you'll never stop emerging. Just keep emerging. Um, so anyways, the work of people that audiences have never heard of, or works by famous people that audiences have never heard of. And what's great is that more and more audiences have not heard of much. So you can play Beethoven Opus 109 and they say, "Gosh, that's a beautiful piece of music. I've never heard that before." And I'm like, what?
