Of Lang Lang's celebrity there can be no doubt. At 25, the globetrotting pianist is the most prominent classical musician ever produced by the world's most populous country. In August, he will carry the Olympic torch 200 meters through the streets of Beijing. If such things were the measure of a performer, his place in our culture would be secure.
But they're not. Though it's hard not to feel something like awe for Lang Lang's mechanical endowment, it's harder not to feel something like pity for his seeming inability to draw on that endowment in a satisfying way. For me, his recital Thursday at the Ordway Center, part of the Schubert Club's 125th-anniversary season, was a study in frustration -- the frustration of seeing a potentially great pianist reduce himself to an almost clownish entertainer.
Thursday's program (to be repeated Saturday in Carnegie Hall) fell neatly into two halves, poetic and pyrotechnic. The first was more disheartening than the second.
I enjoyed Mozart's B-flat Sonata, K.333 -- until its tapered, rhythmically undernourished phrases and minced musical paragraphs became too predictable. Schumann's C-major Fantasy, on the other hand, was a total loss. One of the glories of the 19th-century piano literature, the piece is a love letter to the composer's future wife and an homage to Beethoven.
In Lang Lang's hands it became a long, soggy rumination. He pulled the music like taffy, using it to open a pseudo-romantic space of his own. There was a certain fascination in this process of subversion, but it required a human sacrifice: Schumann himself.
After intermission came transcriptions of "traditional" Chinese songs (which would not sound out of place in a Shanghai shopping mall), a bit of Enrique Granados (the flirtatious "Los Requiebros" from "Goyescas," here curiously bloodless) and thunderous Liszt. But where Liszt's own virtuosity invoked the erotic and the demonic, Lang Lang's is acrobatic and ballistic, signifying nothing beyond itself.
By evening's end, I felt like a seasick voyeur. Behind Lang Lang's superhuman fingers and polished platform persona, I couldn't help but see a troubled young man, tauter than a piano string, struggling bravely (and much too publicly) to grasp what his extraordinary gifts demand of him. Like the Steinway he abused on Thursday, he needs, at the very least, some time off.
Larry Fuchsberg is a Minneapolis writer.
