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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/04/02/070402crmu_music_ross?currentPage=2The Wow FactorLang Lang and Yundi Li at Carnegie Hall.by Alex Ross April 2, 2007 Text Size: Small Text Medium Text Large Text Print E-Mail Feeds
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The ebullient Lang Lang is maturing as an artist. Photograph by Ulrike Schamoni.
Keywords Lang Lang; Li, Yundi; Carnegie Hall; Pianists; Classical Musicians; Asians; Bartok Second Piano Concerto
In the classical-music world of ten or fifteen years ago, you heard intermittent murmurs of unease about the number of Asian performers who were showing up on the rolls of conservatories, in the ranks of orchestras, and on concert stages. The oft-repeated criticism was that these players showed great technical dexterity but lacked the mysteries of “depth” and “soul.” Such talk had an unsavory taste; Wagner used to say the same thing about musical Jews. In any case, the muttering has died down. When Yo-Yo Ma entrances audiences through the force of his personality, when Mitsuko Uchida delves deeper into Mozart and Schubert than almost any pianist alive, and when the virtuosos Lang Lang and Yundi Li conquer crowds with youthful bravado, notions of an “Asian type” can be filed away in the archive of dumb generalizations. The huge popularity of classical music in the Far East, and particularly in China, has created a talent pool a billion deep, from which a disarmingly varied group of musicians is emerging. The irony inherent in the old stereotype is that those fleet-fingered, impersonal performers (yes, there were some) replicated the values of a Western conservatory system that has long emphasized sheer technique at the expense of all else. The music world was, in effect, scapegoating Asians for its own defects.
Earlier this month, Lang Lang and Li appeared at Carnegie Hall forty-eight hours apart. Lang Lang played the Bartók Second Piano Concerto, with the Vienna Philharmonic, under Daniel Barenboim. Li played the Liszt First Piano Concerto, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, under Riccardo Chailly. The two pianists have a few things in common: both were born in China in 1982; both can execute rapid figuration and double octaves with almost irritating ease; both record for the Deutsche Grammophon label; and both are notable for the variety of their hair styles, ranging from the wavy to the spiky and back again. But they’re hardly interchangeable.
Listening to Lang Lang, I think of the absurdist pundit Stephen Colbert, who promises not to read the news to his viewers but to feel the news at them. Lang Lang feels the music at you, in ways both good and bad. He advertises his love of performing simply by the way he charges onstage, and he creates a giddy atmosphere as he negotiates hairpin turns at high speed. Stereotypes to the contrary, you wish at times that he were a little more impersonal. He tends to impose his ebullience on the music, whether or not the music demands it. At his Carnegie Hall solo début, in 2003, he memorably mangled a sequence of pieces by Schumann, Haydn, and Schubert, effectively rewriting them in a humid Romantic-Impressionist style. He is, however, steadily maturing as an artist, and already makes a less willful impression.
Pianists often mention the Bartók Second Concerto as the most taxing piece in the concerto repertory. (The Brahms Second and the Rachmaninoff Third are cited alongside it.) The difficulty lies not just in the writing itself but in the fact that the cascades of notes are intended to conjure a “light and popular” atmosphere, as Bartók himself said. This work, written in the wake of nineteen-twenties neoclassicism, sparkles with Baroque-style counterpoint and Classical melodic play. Lang Lang, who deserves credit for taking on such non-standard fare, flew through the music with ease, but his touch was too hard. He tended to bang out chords at the end of a phrase, relying on extraneous accents to give shape to a line rather than finding its inner contour. Bartók’s requests for leggiero, dolce, and grazioso—light, sweet, graceful playing—often went unheeded; p became mf, mf became ff. Only in the final movement were he and the composer fully in synch. Grins broke out in the audience during the climactic passage where the pianist pounds the lower end of the instrument in tandem with the timpani and bass drum.
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Yundi Li is a cooler presence. His playing is refined, almost severe. He has an intelligent way of shaping phrases, controlling dynamics, varying articulations. When Liszt uses the word dolcissimo in the score of the First Concerto—as sweetly as possible—Li responds in kind; he’s a more naturally poetic soul than Lang Lang. Too often at this Carnegie appearance, though, he seemed in his own world, reluctant to enter into a real give-and-take with the orchestra. In the concerto’s finale, when orchestra and soloist trade dotted rhythms back and forth, Li kept barrelling ahead of the rest of the ensemble; you wanted him to enjoy these showy phrases a little more, pick up a trick or two from the swaggering brass. Still, it was a captivating performance, the kind that you remember as much for its quiet stretches as for its “wow factor,” to borrow a term from “American Idol.” Let’s hope that Li branches out from his favorite Chopin and Liszt. He could deliver a superlative performance of the Bartók Second.
The venerable Gewandhaus Orchestra, which came across as disappointingly shabby at its previous New York appearance, sounds startlingly revitalized in the hands of Chailly, who took over as music director in 2005. Strauss’s tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” made a sublime racket on the second half of the program; Chailly is a master of color and pacing, a spellbinding storyteller. In the sharpness of their musical characterizations, the Leipzigers outclassed the Viennese, who did not have their best outing in the all-Bartók program I heard. A decade after the Philharmonic announced that it would begin admitting women to its ranks, it still has only one fully accredited female member (Charlotte Balzereit, a harpist). It is also blindingly white. Defenders maintain that the Philharmonic cannot abandon its storied traditions in the name of Americanized notions of political correctness, but the chief argument for diversity is, in fact, aesthetic. The Vienna sound is showing symptoms of atrophy; witness the excessively polished, inert rendition of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta that ended the program. The orchestra may have to draw on a wider array of talent if it is to hold its place at the pinnacle.
While Lang Lang and Li lay claim to the Romantic tradition, other gifted young pianists—among them Jonathan Biss, Inon Barnatan, Ingrid Fliter, and Paul Lewis—are taking up the high-minded, anti-virtuoso tradition exemplified by Uchida and Alfred Brendel. The first three recently appeared in New York, trailing the release of outstanding new CDs: Biss has an all-Schumann disk on the E.M.I. label; Barnatan has recorded, for Bridge, Schubert’s august B-Flat-Major Sonata; and Fliter pairs Beethoven and Chopin on VAI Audio. Lewis, who has made an impressive start on a Beethoven cycle for the Harmonia Mundi label, comes to Mostly Mozart this summer.
Biss’s recital took place at the Met Museum’s superbly curated Piano Forte series. On the program were Beethoven’s “Pathétique,” Webern’s Piano Variations, Mozart’s Sonata in F (K. 533), and Schumann’s “Kreisleriana.” Biss offered no radical reinterpretations, but at almost any given moment he seemed to be making the right artistic choice. The slow sections of “Kreisleriana” and the middle movements of the Mozart and the Beethoven magically approximated the sound of one man thinking aloud. Only in the Webern Variations did the pianist fall short; that snowstorm of notes passed by a little too quickly, without settling into a dream landscape.
There’s something almost surreal in the sight and sound of a twenty-six-year-old playing with such unerring sophistication. Listening blind, you might take Biss to be an elderly gentleman of Budapest or Prague, one who has a faint childhood memory of what life was like before Hitler and TV. Sometimes I found myself wishing, perversely, that he would do something peculiar or crude, just for the sake of variety. Lang Lang is the kind of performer you really want to hear when he has grown up a bit and settled down. Biss, on the other hand, may someday wish to take a few more risks, to push against the flow of the music that he understands so well. Then again, why would he want to play differently when he is so close to perfection? ♦ |
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发表于 2008-1-21 10:03:23
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