This is the first time that Yang has adapted a literary work into a piano concerto, and she visited many illustrious composers to discuss her ideas with them. Since Fekete has written for modern opera and film music, Yang says his style is closest to what she wanted in the adaptation.

Fekete says he had read the translation of the work many years ago, but points out that some of the nuances have not been captured in the translation.

"The novel is very oriental and mysterious. Yang described fully the scenes and dialogues for me so that we could express them in the music properly," he says.

Yang, who was born in Muar, Johor, a town on the southwestern coast of Malaysia, began her piano studies at age 5. In 1991, she went to the Vienna National Conservatory of Music to study under pianists including Paul Badura-Skoda, a specialist in Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn.

In 2007, she worked on Beethoven's complete piano concertos as well as The Yellow River piano concerto with the Slovakia Philharmonic and the Lithuania Symphony Orchestra.

She performed her first concert in the capital in 1999 at the Beijing Concert Hall, after which she started concert tours in China. She attributes her affinity for China to her Chinese husband, a businessman with whom she tied the knot in Budapest after graduating from college. Now based in Beijing, Yang wants their 15-year-old twin daughters to undergo traditional Chinese education.

Why has she chosen to adapt an old Chinese classic into a traditional Western musical form? "China has only one famous piano work, The Yellow River, in its contemporary music canon," Yang says, "so there is a need for an influential piano concerto. There have been limitations in expressing Chinese culture in the foreign mainstream cultural circles. Through this adaptation, I want to express Chinese traditional culture in the modern, Western form."

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