The yin and yang of China's piano elite
By Timothy Pfaff
Published: April 26 2004 18:52 | Last Updated: April 26 2004 18:52
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"While many pianophiles take umbrage at the way both Lang and Li are packaged, the off-key overstatements that characterise Lang's promotion have provoked a particularly strong backlash.
Conductors with whom Lang has played have publicly called his musicianship shallow and he has attracted increasingly harsh notices. Reviewing the concert that has become Lang's latest CD, Live from Carnegie Hall, the New York Times said his playing was "often incoherent, self-indulgent and slam-bang crass".
By contrast, the strongest charges levelled against Li are that he can seem "detached" on the stage. His explanation during a soft-spoken backstage interview between performances was quiet but direct: "When I go onstage, I am already in the music.
While I'm presenting myself to the audience, I'm really already at the piano." The genuineness of this remark was obvious in both of his San Francisco recitals.He rushed in from the wings, a quick bow and fleeting smile audience-ward barely preceding his headlong plunge into the four Chopin Scherzos (the repertoire of his next CD) before his tuxedo tails had touched down.
"It's the first notes that are interesting for me," he says in reply to my question about his widely acknowledged spontaneity as a player. "How they catch you is magic. Thank God I have a different feeling with every concert. Of course I have a clear idea about the piece, but I never play the same. If you do, you are not an artist, you are a machine."
In Lang's San Francisco recitals, presented, like Li's, by San Francisco Performances, his technical prowess and almost obsessively manicured tone (not to mention his calculated stage manner) could not disguise that the performances differed little from his CD recordings and showed scant stylistic differences in music that ranged from Haydn to Tan Dun.
Li's two performances of the Liszt Sonata, by contrast, both represented advances on his already masterful recording, and were markedly different in matters of detail. His steely concentration released imaginative, risk-taking interpretations. "If you are in the music, you catch the audience's heart and they can follow you into your playing, into your world," he says. "Beauty of sound is very important for me, but you have to find the sound as much as make it. It comes from inside the piano. If you don't find the right sound, it will not go out, even if you dig deep into the fortes . . . there must be something inside, or else you are just playing on the skin."
The two have largely resisted talking about each other, but Lang has said that "Li's "career is not big yet," adding, "I hope he will have a big career." Only slightly more circumspectly, but with an implied swipe at Li, he told me that, with his own, ready-for-prime-time concert repertoire, "I am ready. If you are young and only have several pieces, one day you will be gone because of that."
Seemingly anticipating the comment (not relayed to him), Li volunteers: "I don't care what people think about how much repertoire I have. I know a lot of pieces. But I want to prepare what I offer audiences each year. Although I like playing concertos very much, it's hard to work together with a conductor with only two days of rehearsal. I think I am strongest in recital.
"Pianists should progress, have time to study, read books and live life to enlarge our minds. I plan to have a long career, so I don't mind going slowly. It is a long way to go."
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