Lang Lang: piano star the critics love to hate

[Billy R]

Jasper Rees
Published: 12:01AM GMT 10 Nov 2008

Lang Lang is a hero in China and a box-office wonder in the West. So why are reviews so harsh? He talks to Jasper Rees.

Is Lang Lang a good thing? When he first sprouted as a teenage prodigy, he was greeted as a forerunner of China's musical miracle. The glowing tributes stacked up, the recordings flowed (next up: a new Chopin CD), the concert schedule mounted and he became a phenomenon - a classical musician who provoked the adulation normally associated with a rock star.

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The most recent visit of the Lang Lang circus to these shores was at the Proms, where for two hours one Sunday afternoon he recited everything from Mozart to traditional Chinese melodies. Only Brendel and Kissin, he is proud to note, have ever enjoyed the same compliment at the Albert Hall.

The reviews were almost universally withering. Too wide-ranging a programme, they growled. Too much eye-popping showmanship. Not enough care. Not enough sensitivity. But the audience seemed to have a good time. Lang Lang has become one of those artists whose career prospers outside the boundaries of critical approval. Still only 26, he is bemused by the backlash.

"You get many good reviews from the beginning," he says, "and then the critics start criticising you. It's strange. The things they liked you for first - unique, fresh - they say is great. And then later they say you're too fresh, too unique. But they're the same thing!"

* Geoffrey Norris reviews Lang Lang at the Festival Hall
* Ivan Hewett reviews Lang Lang at the Proms
* Telegraph Music homepage

This is the only sign of exasperation when we meet at the London premises of Steinway. Lang Lang exudes an air of entitlement. His roadshow is never-ending. Only last weekend he was playing Beethoven's First Piano Concerto at the Lincoln Centre with the New York Philharmonic. In April he returns to London for a series of concerts at the Barbican and St Luke's, two of them featuring the Chinese music he does his bit to promote.

"I have some responsibility, of course. I find many of the pieces are really good. But if the work is bad there's nothing you can do. I love football, but the Chinese football team is useless."

He will also hold a masterclass which will culminate in a performance of Schubert's Marche Militaire for 100 pianists. Somehow you can't see Martha Argerich accepting that booking.

It's possible, however, that the outsize performance style is not entirely of his own making. It could be partly attributable to his roots in Shenyang in north-east China.

"In general, people from the north-east talk very loud and are not very behaving," he says. "For art it's good because they are not afraid of anything. Crazy people. Many of the comedy hosts come from there."

The lionisation of Lang Lang is at its most marked in China. Where classical music was off limits during the Cultural Revolution, there are now 30 million piano pupils; at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony Lang Lang had a solo spot. The swing of the barometer sometimes baffles even Lang Lang himself. "Young kids think piano is pretty cool stuff. You see many parents come to concerts with the kid and sometimes the kid was really excited and the parents were [he makes a snoring sound]. I saw this when I am playing. The kids don't feel Mozart is that old. So that certainly helps. I must say these kids are crazy. I just had a few days in Shanghai and all these kids start saying, 'I want to study with you.' And they're four or five years old! Those kids are groupies already."

There is something of the child still in China's Pied Pianist. His affinity with children - at the Albert Hall and elsewhere he has duetted with the Chinese-American infant phenomenon Marc Yu - may stem from the fact that he waved goodbye to a normal childhood when he won a piano competition playing Liszt and Mozart at five. When Lang Lang first performed Chopin's F minor piano concerto - it was his debut with an orchestra - he noted its mood of exquisite yearning but, being 13, had nothing to relate it to. So his father told him to think of his mother. His mother had been left behind in Shenyang when his father took him to study in Beijing, and then America.

Though he has performed the E minor "at least 40 times", Chopin's concertos are hardly the most vaunted in the repertoire - the orchestrations are often described as perfunctory. But to Lang Lang they are "like a simple operatic orchestration. It's certainly not like Brahms, which is almost like a symphony. But it's hard to find the right sound. They are probably the most lyric and sensitive concertos. The melodic line is so pretty. Even if they don't like classical music, everybody likes Chopin's melody. He is one of very few composers who made the piano really sing."

The analogy recasts Lang Lang as a bel canto tenor who has somehow missed his vocation. It would explain a lot, including why he likes working in supergroup couplings with singers. A Leoncavallo CD with Domingo ("kind of high-level elevator music") is coming soon, and a recording with Cecilia Bartoli is planned.

"I love to work with singers because you learn so much. Every note has a meaning. It helps me to understand the phrasing and also the expression in the music. Bartoli is my favourite singer in the world today. Very few open up your heart. When she comes to the stage she's like a sun. The whole room is sparkling with stars."

Is it any wonder that Lang Lang wanted to take his place at the Beijing opening ceremony? He had a foretaste of the sort of glitzy spectacle that gives his detractors indigestion when, a year before the Games, he donned red tails to play the Yellow River Concerto in a bombastic outdoor concert. Then in January he opened Beijing's miraculous new concert hall (which "is very nice but outside is better, like a big UFO landed"). For all the accolade of these bookings, he was still terrified that he would be bypassed for the Olympics.

"I was afraid that my part would be cut out because it's so focused on Chinese instruments and Chinese culture. Thank God it was still in. I loved it. Especially the piano is in the middle of the Bird's Nest. Unbelievable. I still get excited just to talk about that."

Lang Lang's recording of the Chopin piano concertos is released on Universal on Nov 17.

[Billy R]

29 August 2009 22:50

Lang Lang performed Chopin's 2nd Concerto at the Prom on the 27th of
August 2009. He is undoubtedly the world's most popular musician among
children and young peeople. No pop or rock musician has ever matched
his popularity around the world. When he appeared on Chinese
television, 800 milllion people tuned in. That's about 2 thirds of that
nation's population.

The largest audience ever in Britain was
abourt 33 million who watched the World Cup between England and Germany
back in 1966. Even that wasn't 2 thirds of the population. Today, when
17 million watch such as 'Britain's Got Talent, The Final', it's
considered a gargantuan audiencee.

Critics enjoy slagging off Lang Lang, calling him a "vulgar showman".
This from critic Michael White of The Telegraph:



It’s ironic that the Chinese pianist Lang
Lang is in residency this month at the Barbican. You may not like his vulgar,
self-indulgent playing - me, I hate it - but you can’t deny he has charisma (of
a brutally commercial kind); and back in China he’s the role model for
literally millions upon millions of young players. Every second child in China
seems to want to learn the piano. And I’ve seen this for myself.


In Beijing there are teaching factories
where six or seven hundred infant pianists pile in every Saturday and bash away
at six or seven hundred pianos in sound-proofed cubicles. They do it with a
grim determination that’s not terribly attractive to a Western liberal
sensibility, and I don’t say that the process turns them all into great artists.
But it does provide a grounding from which armies of extremely promising young
Chinese pianists are emerging.


Meanwhile, here in Britain, we have
nothing to compare. You don’t believe me? Count the heads of British pianists
as against their foreign counterparts in UK music colleges. And check out LIPC
later in the month. If you can bear the shame.


[/i]


There are about 40 million children
learning to play piano, simply because they want to be like Lang Lang.

One is forced to wonder if critics actually know anything about what they are critcizing. What are Michael White's credentials? It's my guess, that if these critics were to hear a Lang Lang performance, but could not see him, and they were told it was Ashkenazy or Argerich who was playing, would they be able to respond by exclaiming, "No it's not, that's Lang Lang!"? I suspect not!.

[Billy R]

I've just watched last week's concert again. It grows on me the more I watch it. I've been thinking about the petty and bitchy criticisms that the snob world of classical piano hurls at Lang Lang and anyone else who doesn't wear a dickie-bow tie and tails. Why are these people so snobby and bitchy? When I've been to the AGM of the Leeds Piano Comp., there they all are with their posh accents and stern stiff upper lip facial expressions and poise. Enough to make one sick. This would really get up their nose - in the same weekend, I watched The Proms, and the Reading and Leeds Festivals. Could you see them getting high on Stephen Hough and the Arctic Monkeys or Kings Of Leon all in the same day? Like I said, enough to make yer sick with their self styled and created superiority. They don't say 'piano' like we do, it's PEE-ARNO. *&^*$%& heck.

One of the people who were discussing Lang Lang's performance afterwards hit the nail on the head when he said that Lang Lang ........"doesn't conform to the 19th century stereotype (not his exact word, but I can't remember what word he used)". What I do know is that Lang Lang is bigger than any pop or rock musician both now and in the past. He's got more fans than the Beatles had in their hey day. He sells out concerts faster than pop and rock groups. That'll do for me.