A piano concerto is a piece of music written for a piano, where the piano is accompanied by either a large body of instruments or a whole orchestra. See also harpsichord concerto; some of these works are occasionally played on piano. Joseph Haydn and Thomas Arne wrote concertos for fortepiano or harpsichord, at the period of time when they were in common usage (the late 18th century). Piano concertos were also somewhat common in the time of Bach and Handel.

As the piano developed and became accepted, composers naturally started writing concerti for it. This happened in the late 18th century and so corresponded to the Classical music era. The most important composer in the development of the form in these early stages was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart's body of masterly piano concerti put his stamp firmly on the genre well into the Romantic era.

Mozart wrote many of his piano concertos for himself to perform (his 27 piano concertos also include concerti for two and three pianos). With the rise of the piano virtuoso, many composer-pianists did likewise, notably Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, and also the somewhat lesser-known Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Carl Maria von Weber, John Field, Ferdinand Ries, and F. X. Mozart. Many other Romantic composers wrote pieces in the form, well known examples including the concerti by Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Edward Elgar made sketches for a piano concerto but never completed it.

Yuja Wang (Chinese: 王羽佳; pinyin: Wáng Yǔjiā; born February 10, 1987) is a Chinese classical pianist. She was born in Beijing, began studying piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Wang comes from a musical family. She entered Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music at age seven and studied there for three years. At age 11, Wang was accepted as the youngest student in the Morningside Music Bridge International Music Festival at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. . After several summers of participating in the program, Wang moved to Canada at age 14 to continue her studies at the Mount Royal University Conservatory.

In 1998, Wang won 3rd Prize in the Ettlingen International Competition for Young Pianists, in Ettlingen, Germany. In 2001, she won Third Prize and Special Jury Prize (awarded to an especially superior finalist of less than 20 years in age, prize money of 500,000 Japanese Yen) in the Piano Section at the First Sendai International Music Competition in Sendai, Japan.