Brand-new Steinway gets its Anchorage debut, courtesy Van Cliburn medalist Joyce Yang

There will be two stars present on the stage of the Discovery Theatre Friday night. One has two legs, the other has three.

Star one is pianist Joyce Yang, a silver medalist in the 2005 Van Cliburn Piano Competition, whose international audience-pleasing performances include a reading of the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Anchorage Symphony in 2015.

In a 2010 interview with San Francisco writer Marianne Lipanovich, Yang said, "People started asking me, 'What is it that makes your playing so exceptional?' And I realized that what I was doing was making people happy."

[Related: Here are some of the shows and concerts headed to Anchorage in 2017]

Yang was born in South Korea in 1986. Her father was a chemical engineer and her mother a molecular biologist, whose careers took them around the world. It was not a particularly musical family, she said, but when an aunt started to give her piano lessons at age 4, she was immediately enthralled. "It was a massive, incredibly special toy," she said.

At 9 years old, on a vacation to New York with her mother, she auditioned for an instructor at the Juilliard School who urged her to move to the Big Apple. In the years that followed she spent more time in America than in Korea. (She now resides in New York.) She had a manager by the time she was 12.

Her big break came at the 2005 Van Cliburn contest. "It was 10 months of intense preparation to get into the competition," she told Lipanovich. "I had never practiced like that before. I needed five hours of repertoire, which was everything I could play!"

Adding to the tension was a film crew documenting the event. "Even before I began playing, people were following me around because I was the youngest contestant." She was 19. "That was pressure."

Nonetheless, competing against 34 other virtuosos, she won the silver and, much to her satisfaction, picked up the first-place award for chamber music, performing with the Takacs Quartet. "I love collaborating," she said.

With fame came a stream of invitations. "It took me a million years to get my bachelor's degree, because after the Van Cliburn competition I was touring more than going to school," she said in 2010. "I've been at Juilliard longer than any other student — about 13 years!"

The concert circuit has continued nonstop for her. After Anchorage she'll head to Minneapolis to perform the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Minnesota Orchestra.

The other star on the stage will stay right there, not even venturing to poke one of its three legs outside the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. It's the brand-new Steinway Model D concert grand piano, recently acquired by the center after a community fundraising campaign that generated more than $160,000.

"It's the first 9-foot grand that we've ever owned," said Anne Garrett, director of development and marketing for the center.

The American-made Steinway was selected in part because it is the brand of choice for many performing artists, some of whom have contracts that require them to use Steinways whenever possible.

The center considered looking for a single donor to pay for the instrument but "we wanted to make this a community effort," Garrett said.

So an online website dubbed "88 Keys" was started, which invited smaller donors to "buy" a key.

The campaign was a rousing success, Garrett said, with individuals and organizations plunking down the cash to "purchase" the C-sharps, B-flats, G-naturals and other ebonies and ivories. "A final Rasmuson grant for $25,000 put us over the top," Garrett said.

[Related: Donations pay for arts center's new Steinway piano, 1 key at a time]

In October a delegation of Alaskans led by University of Alaska Anchorage piano professor Timothy Smith flew to the Steinway factory in New York. The company had assembled five instruments for testing, one of which was selected. The instrument arrived in Anchorage in early December and has since been assembled, tuned, balanced and kept warm in advance of its upcoming debut.

Keeping the complex machine of 12,000 parts at a proper temperature and humidity is an ongoing challenge, but necessary to keep the piano in playable condition for years to come. It's a problem in places with extreme conditions — like Alaska (and a notorious issue in the tropics). Additional money received through the "88 Keys" program will be used to retrofit a storage area to keep it humidified, Garrett said, and to provide basic maintenance.

The Friday program will include fiery contemporary work by Ginastera, the deeply romantic and lyrical compositions of Grieg and Schumann, and the delicate music of Debussy.

"I don't have 200 pounds of vertical power," the slender Yang said. "I can really whisper."