Piano Man by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal 21 February 2014
If classical music must have a rock star, let it be Lang Lang.
21 February 2014
Virtuosic piano playing is typically associated with breathtakingly fast tempos and thunderous cascades of notes. The Chinese pianist Lang Lang’s recent Carnegie Hall recital showed to the contrary that slow speeds and simplicity provide the most exacting test of musical skill. The three Mozart sonatas with which he opened the concert are deceptively accessible to the nonprofessional pianist; their very simplicity of means can leave the amateur wondering how to bring interest to long passages of arpeggiated left-hand accompaniment or the lightly ornamented scales that transition from one theme to another. Lang Lang provided an answer available only to the greatest musicians: each note is a source of beauty and wonderment, part of a perfectly unfolding arc of feeling. And his capacity to shape that arc was most astounding in the sonatas’ slow movements.
The opening adagio movement of Mozart’s Sonata No. 4 in E-flat major begins with a strangely unsettled melodic line: phrases that seem to end on an offbeat unexpectedly start up again, recalling Haydn’s haunting Sturm-und-Drang-period stops and starts. Lang Lang brought to this introduction a perfect calm, listening intently to the sudden silences and letting them breathe. An arpeggiated left-hand accompaniment then rises out of the stillness; in Lang Lang’s hands, this standard Classical-era device was a living thing, languorously pushing back against the beat while the bittersweet melody sung on top.
In the Sonata No. 8 in A minor, the sunny Andante cantabile second movement arrived like a tranquil harbor after the heartbreaking Allegro maestoso that opens the work. If Lang Lang’s attacks in the Allegro maestoso were occasionally too staccato to convey that movement’s full tragic depth, the otherworldly double trill that concluded the Andante movement and the hushed left-hand chords that opened its development section looked forward to late Beethoven. Lang Lang’s slow tempos can be very slow, almost recalling Ivo Pogorelić, the Croatian pianist who created a sensation in the 1980s with his mannered extremes of tempo and rubato. Lang Lang, however, never loses control of the musical momentum, even across large expanses of quiet. And it is during those moments of repose, where each note is laid bare, that a pianist’s muscular control is put most unforgivingly on display. Lang Lang’s physical prowess is such that he can calibrate the most subtle dynamic shadings between notes played pianissimo, creating a constantly varied musical landscape.
Lang Lang easily made the case for Mozart the proto-Romantic, fittingly paired on the Carnegie program with Chopin’s four Ballades. …
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