LANG
LANG Bridgewater Hall
His playing
was, as ever, absolutely stunning in technical skill and constantly challenging
in its interpretative curiosity. It was quite daring, really, to begin with
Tchaikovsky’s 12-part The Seasons. It’s not his greatest music – but it’s very
characteristic of a composer full of the feeling of later Romanticism:
sentimental at times, but often dramatic and occasionally inspired.
Lang Lang
responds to the dramatic – that was obvious from the January movement onwards.
He also loves the chance to play in big, bravura style – we heard that in
February, September and November.
And often
he can change the whole emotional content of a piece from what you might
expect, without any deviation from the score, by using its rhythms, phrasing
and cadences in a novel way. He turned August into a jazzy extravaganza with
emphatic syncopations, earning mid-piece applause in its own right.
One thing
I’m right with him on is his rhythmic freedom. That was the way pianists played
for most of the 19th century and it’s a legacy of later
‘correctness’ that everything should be metronome-regular.
Bach, of
course, is a different language. He played the Italian Concerto with bouncing
rhythms in the outer movements and a little eccentricity – he was having fun –
and an exemplarily eloquent arioso between them.
Finally he
moved into some of the greatest piano music written, in all four of Chopin’s
Scherzos. Most piano soloists tackle just one to show off: he powered through
them, with often exciting and also meltingly beautiful melodic playing,
sometimes weird in its interpretation of the written expression marks, but
always holding the audience in its spell.
The last
two held the best playing of the evening, showing affection for the music, not
just showmanship, incredible virtuosity, and an ability to find beauties in the
writing that even Chopin may not have suspected he’d created.
*****
Robert
Beale
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