Singapore pianist Wang Congyu left school at 16, had no stable home in Paris and became a Steinway Artist

When Wang Congyu sat down in an office at a concert hall in Courbevoie, northwest of Paris, he had already flown in from the south of France, taught piano masterclasses for four or five hours and asked one of his students to present the concert taking place elsewhere in the building.

Wang could have been forgiven for looking depleted when he sat down for the interview with CNA Luxury. Instead, the Singaporean concert pianist joked, gesticulated animatedly and spoke at the speed of a sprint.

This is just another day in Wang’s life. The 34-year-old, who grew up in Clementi, performs internationally, directs music festivals and has recorded albums devoted to Poulenc and Debussy. Since 2022, he has been a Steinway Artist, joining the piano maker’s international roster alongside musicians such as Diana Krall, Lang Lang and Billy Joel.

He had come a long way. When he dropped out of school and moved to Paris at 16 to study music, he was effectively homeless. He slept on friends’ couches and sometimes went weeks without a proper meal.

“The only thing I was thinking about was the next day,” he said. “What you’re going to eat, where you’re going to sleep.”

On paper, Wang’s story has the contours of a classic underdog tale: A school dropout who played piano for supper became a Steinway Artist whose work now brings together young soloists, teachers, conductors and orchestras. Wang does not see it that way. 

“I don’t have any success,” he said. “It’s just like survival mode.”

Yet it raises the question: How did a boy who hated the piano, walked out of school and landed in Paris without a bed become a Steinway Artist performing on international stages?

THE PIANO HE HATED

For a man who has built his life around the piano, Wang’s first encounter with it was adversarial.

“I hated it,” he said. “I was really bad at it.”

Wang was three when his parents made him learn his first tunes. His older sister played the piano and violin, excelled at school and later became a doctor. Wang describes himself as her rebellious opposite: unexceptional at school and unwilling to practise an instrument he had never chosen.

Music caught his interest at about 13, when the chapel band at Fairfield Methodist Secondary School needed a pianist. Few students could play, so Wang joined. The others encouraged him and told him he was good. 

“I didn’t know I had a gift,” he said.

Their praise did what compulsory lessons had failed to do. Wang began visiting the library at the Esplanade after school, photocopying scores for 50 cents a page. He borrowed CDs, copied them onto an old laptop and filled his MP3 player with recordings. The boy once forced to practise was now hunting for something new to play.

His family remained unconvinced that music could provide a stable profession. By 16, the problem was no longer how to make Wang play the piano – it was how to stop him from abandoning everything else for it.

PLAYING FOR SUPPER

Determined to develop his skills, Wang applied to five music schools abroad. The Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris was the only one that replied, offering a scholarship that covered tuition but nothing beyond the classroom. He then did something that would make many Singaporean parents recoil in horror: He dropped out of school before sitting his O levels.

“I want to try it for myself, and I want to fail,” he explained.

Even at that age, Wang saw Singapore’s education system as a pressure cooker, with students competing for the same grades and conventional careers. He wanted another way.

“I wasn’t running away from home,” he said. “I was running away from that situation.” 

His mother feared that music would never support him, but she helped him make the trip. With savings from teaching piano and pocket money from his mother, Wang bought his ticket to France and never looked back.

He first stayed with another young musician he had met through Facebook, then moved between the homes of classmates, acquaintances and people he had only just met. Every two or three days, Wang had to find another couch.
Warm meals, too, were scarce. During one stretch of roughly three weeks, he scavenged for food and ate only once every two or three days. People he met sometimes offered him restaurant vouchers after noticing how quickly he had lost weight.

One night, Wang was playing in a Paris bar when a man trying to impress his girlfriend requested a piece. Wang obliged. In return, the man told him he could order anything he wanted from the menu.

Wang began pointing. “This, this, this, this,” he recalled, laughing and jabbing at an imaginary menu. He estimated that he ordered 20 items. The man’s girlfriend stared, unaware that the teenager at the piano was ravenous.

The instrument Wang had once resisted was now feeding him.

A Singaporean friend eventually introduced him to a church in Paris, where a family offered him a place to stay. He completed his studies at the Ecole Normale and later the Schola Cantorum. Then, in 2012, just as life in France was becoming more stable, Singapore called him home for National Service, putting his fledgling career on hold.

NO SCORE WAITING

For part of those two years, he served in the Singapore Civil Defence Force band, where he learnt to improvise and respond to a room. “It felt like forever,” he said.

During National Service, Wang applied to become a Young Steinway Artist and was accepted. Yet no concert career awaited him when he completed his service. Some months brought engagements; others brought silence.

When performances did come, reviewers began to notice. Writing in The Straits Times in 2015, Chang Tou Liang praised Wang’s gentle touch and musical storytelling, describing him as “incapable of any ugly sound”.

Competitions offered another measure of his ability. Wang won grand prizes in Berlin and Bordeaux, along with awards in France, Indonesia and Estonia. At the Chopin International Piano Competition for Young Pianists in Slovenia, however, he placed sixth. According to Wang’s official biography, juror Francois Weigel believed Wang deserved to win and resigned from the jury in protest.

THE ISLAND WITH NO PIANO

Yet competitions did not determine where Wang would build his life. Marriage did.

Roughly two years after receiving help from the church in Paris, Wang met Julie Lu there. Lu came from Reunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, where her family ran a chain of Asian supermarkets. Building a life with her meant leaving Paris and its conservatories, concert halls and pianos.

Lu gave him a blunt account of what awaited him. “People don’t like classical music,” she told him. “We don’t have a concert hall. No pianos.”

Wang was undeterred. “We had to try it.”

Determined, he bought a nine-foot Steinway concert grand in Paris and had it shipped across the Indian Ocean. He and Lu placed it in a venue that had not been designed for classical music, announced a recital and waited.

The room was full.

He organised another concert. It filled again. “Every year we did it, it was full,” he said. Without suitable venues or easy access to instruments, Wang moved the Steinway between concert spaces and even took it into the mountains to perform.

The concerts proved there was an audience. Wang opened a music school that grew to between 80 and 100 students, then trained pupils to become instructors because Reunion did not have enough piano teachers.

When COVID-19 halted international travel, he remained on the island and taught for as many as 12 hours a day. He composed, improvised and posted videos online, growing his Instagram audience to more than 100,000. In June 2022, as international travel resumed, a letter in his postbox informed him that Steinway & Sons had named him a Steinway Artist.

As concert halls reopened, invitations multiplied, producing what Wang called “an explosion of concerts”. His schedule took him away from Reunion for long stretches, so he stepped back from daily lessons and left the school in the hands of the instructors he had trained.

The island once said to have no audience, no piano and too few teachers now had all three.

The school became a model for the festivals and competitions Wang went on to found. One is the Piano Island Festival, which brings young pianists together with international teachers and competition juries; its eighth edition was held in Hainan in July 2026.

Another is the Piano Concerto Festival, which held its sixth edition in 2026. It aims to give pianists something harder to obtain: repeated rehearsals with a professional symphony orchestra. After all, a pianist may spend years learning a concerto without once playing it with an orchestra; some first encounter one during a competition final, when every mistake matters.

THE MENTOR HE NEVER HAD

That festival was what brought Wang to the concert hall in Courbevoie, where CNA Luxury met him. Elsewhere in the building, students were rehearsing with 45 orchestral musicians under the guidance of professors and conductors. There were no rankings or prizes at stake. The students could stop, try again and learn what an orchestra demanded of them.

Wang knows what it is like to have talent without knowing what to do with it. His childhood teachers recognised his ability, he said, but none could explain how to build a performing career.

“I never met a mentor who could show me the way,” he said.

Now he introduces young musicians to teachers, conductors and orchestras. He gives them rehearsal time, professional recordings, instruction and experience performing before an audience. 

“I feel like I could be that guy now for someone else,” he said.

That afternoon in Courbevoie, Wang sat downstairs while his students rehearsed and performed with a professional orchestra elsewhere in the building. One student presented the concert in his place.

At 16, Wang had arrived in Paris without a bed, regular meals or a mentor to explain what came next. That evening, his students would leave Courbevoie having played with an orchestra, worked with established teachers and met people they could turn to for advice.

For Wang, it seems, success depends less on how many stages he plays than on whether his students can reach theirs without having to find their way alone.