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| Cheryl North :: Interviews |  | |
Cheryl North Interviews Lang Lang prior to his performance at the Opening Concert of the San Francisco Symphony, September 9, 2009Material from the Classical Music Column for the September 4, 2009 Preview Section, Bay Area News Group, under the headlines, "Lang Lang, man of contrasts, opens S.F. Symphony season" and "Lang Lang not fazed by Prokofiev's 3rd." If Roman philosopher Seneca's assertion that "art imitates nature" (or life) is true, then one could be well on the way to understanding the sometimes startling extremes in Chinese pianist Lang Lang's piano playing. At 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Lang will be welcomed on San Francisco's Davies Hall stage to perform Sergei Prokofiev's thrilling Piano Concerto No. 3 under the baton of Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas for the San Francisco Symphony's 2009-2010 season-opening gala. Additional works on the program will be Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1, Ravel's La Valse and Richard Rodgers' Carousel Waltz. Now arguably one of the greatest pianists of his generation, Lang is welcomed on the world's most prestigious stages, where he routinely performs with its most renowned orchestras and conductors. In 2008 he not only played for a worldwide audience at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, he also played with jazz pianist Herbie Hancock at the Grammy Awards.
Born in 1982 in the small industrial city of Shenyang in northern China, Lang Lang (his family and given names are the same in English, but slightly different in Chinese) is the only child of victims of the Chinese government's Cultural Revolution. His father, a talented performer on the Chinese erhu, spent $300, half of his yearly salary, to buy a piano for his gifted toddler. His mother played classical music for him when he was still in her womb.
(Photo by Warner North of Cheryl North and Lang Lang's mother, following the performance September 9, backstage at Davies Hall, San Francisco)
When he was 8, his father took him to live in Beijing so that he could study piano at one of the city's best schools. While there, father and son lived in utter poverty, supported only by the mother's earnings back in Shenyang as a telephone operator. Father Lang Guoren would pedal his young son on the back of his rickety bicycle many miles to and from his piano lessons. Lang's piano performance style brims with stark contrasts. His admirers feel obliged to summon up the most superlative adjectives to describe his Olympian digital dexterity and mature musical sensitivity. But his detractors have used words like "melodramatic" and "immature" to describe his extravagant performance mannerisms. Some have nicknamed him Bang Bang. One of his first teachers in Beijing scoffed, "You play like a potato farmer."
Such carps have been countered by a prominent U.S. critic's comment, "Lang's interpretations aren't just expressions of feeling, but are the feelings themselves." Even the great American conductor Daniel Barenboim has joked, "He (Lang Lang) has 11 fingers." Another prominent critic has asserted that Lang's virtuosity and charisma have characteristics that range somewhere between Romantic composer/ pianist Franz Liszt and 21st-century rock star Bono of U2.
Acknowledging his dramatic performance tendencies, Lang blames it all on the music itself. "When you play a piece of great music," he said, "you are not you anymore. You are totally into the world of its composer's mind."
Although it was 1:05 p.m. in the Bay Area when my telephone interview with Lang began, it was 10:05 p.m. in Germany, where he had just finished a performance of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2. Nonetheless, he was affable and expansive in his responses to my questions.
Explaining the two "Langs" in his name, he said, "Each Lang means something different in Chinese. The first means 'gentleman'; the second, 'bright.'"
He expressed his delight in playing once again with Tilson Thomas and the S.F. Symphony, avowing that under his baton, "the orchestra has become one of the very best in the world. And besides, the San Francisco Bay Area audiences have always been incredibly supportive of me." About the Prokofiev 3rd Piano Concerto, he said, "It's an easy piece for audiences to understand. In difficulty, it measures about a two or three on a scale of five "... but it has one of the most exciting finales in all of music."
Of course, as most musicians consider the Prokofiev 3rd to be excruciatingly difficult, I felt compelled to ask Lang just which concerto he would consider to be a level 5. "The Rachmaninoff 3rd," he said without the slightest hesitation. He revealed that one of his favorite works to play for his own enjoyment when he is alone is J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. When Lang is not involved with the piano, he likes reading and admits to being a "huge sportsman," noting that he admires Chinese basketball ace Yao Ming and roots for any team that hails from Philadelphia, where he attended the Curtis School of Music.
And what sort of epitaph does he hope to have after he's lived to a ripe old age? "I would like to be known for encouraging young children throughout the world to study great classical music," he answered. Last year he made a couple of giant steps toward this goal when he launched the Lang Lang International Music Foundation in New York and became the youngest person appointed as the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. |
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