“It’s been such an incredible journey so far at The Cliburn,” semi-finalist Angel Stanislav Wang tells Apple Music Classical. “Thanks to the audience and the amazing Cliburn team, the inspiration and drive to create and enjoy music never stops.” Born in Los Angeles of US immigrants—a Chinese father and a Russian mother, who both ran a music school—Angel Stanislav Wang enjoyed creating and presenting dramas from an early age in his family’s living room, using costumes and sets as well as special lighting. His true vocation became clear, though, when his mother started teaching him piano from the age of five, and Wang demonstrated his love of music by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff by replicating their harmonies at the keyboard. His mother sent him to live with his Russian grandparents in Moscow, where he followed her footsteps by attending the Gnessin Special School of Music, followed by the Central Music School, and from 2020 the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Notwithstanding his American nationality, he is in effect a thoroughbred Russian pianist of the Moscow school. You can hear this in Wang’s forthright account in his semifinal recital of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, a work which he imbues with strikingly dramatic qualities. American composer William Bolcom makes an appearance with two of the Twelve New Etudes: “Fast, furious”, absolutely living up to its name in Wang’s performance, and “Hymne à l’amour” which slowly but surely reveals its expressive heart. Finally, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a work that Wang was “particularly excited to perform,” he tells Apple Music Classical: “I think that these ‘pictures’ have a metaphorical meaning of the more complicated human emotions, including torment (‘Gnomus’), melancholy and stillness (‘Il vecchio castello’), deviousness (‘Tuileries’, subtitled ‘Children’s quarrel after a game’), and playfulness (‘Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks’).” Wang’s impressive performance of this piano cycle, one of the most demanding in the repertoire in terms of sheer technique and demands for stamina, culminated in a ferocious “Baba-Yaga” and the majestic “Great Gate of Kiev.”