Lang Lang review – captivating, astonishing and disorientating

The Guardian

18-04-2025

Think what you will of Lang Lang's brand of pianist-celebrity, but his technical control is absolute. The right-hand melody of Fauré's Pavane was so smooth it might have been glued together. Descant lines tinkled like a tiny music box. His left hand was heavyweight throughout, as if he had decided to turn up the bass.
Such oddity was nothing compared to his take on Schumann's Kreisleriana – a set of eight self-consciously eccentric miniatures. Lang Lang launched himself on to the keyboard for the first, driving hard and loud, his hands flying theatrically at the end. For contrast: more of that hushed music-box tone and passages of precious, gossamer delicacy before instantaneous switches back into muscular rollicking dissonance. A more-is-more approach to the sustaining pedal turned some moments into spectacular slush. Just occasionally, there was a magical, quiet sense of storytelling and the penultimate movement was suddenly, playfully dry (pedal briefly abandoned) until yet another gear change into a passage smashed out so quickly it blurred. In the final movement Lang's ever-dominant left hand treated Schumann like Rachmaninov.
With barely a break between most movements, it was a disorientating listen, the audience helped along only by Lang's repertoire of physical cues: face lifted upwards, eyes closed; body hunched intensely over the keys; arms whirling away from the piano as if it was scorching.
The second half was mainly Chopin Mazurkas. Once again, Lang allowed few gaps between individual numbers. Once again, there were crystalline quiet moments, loudly galumphing moments (accompanied periodically by stamping) and moments that hauled Chopin monumentally into the world of late Romanticism. Yet Lang's rhythmic freedom was astonishing, his sense of producing each number as an improvisation utterly captivating. In his hands, this familiar music became quite alien.
By partway through the mazurka-fest, wriggling and coughing were constant. But if defamiliarisation wasn't what some audience members had hoped for, their reward was Chopin's Polonaise in F sharp minor played as a vigorous romp, which precipitated an explosive ovation barely calmed by two encores – 'Chopin' from Schumann's Carnaval and Debussy's Clair de Lune – the latter so exquisitely quiet it seemed to emanate from elsewhere.