By Dennis D. Rooney
Following his U.S. debut with the Chicago Symphony in 2000, Lang Lang came in for a hail of critical brickbats, some of which I lobbed myself, on account of his flashy shallowness, crassness and mannerisms. I once heard him in a Brahms First Concerto in Carnegie Hall with conductor James Levine, each of whom eagerly sought to be more mannered than the other. It was awful. I remember that when it ended that it was like being let out of jail.
As he approaches his 35th birthday next fall, Lang Lang has matured, on the basis of his Feb. 21 recital in the Kravis Center’s Dreyfoos Concert Hall. Before a discussion of what was right and what was not so much, one must applaud the pianist’s beautiful, pearly tone, which enriched almost everything on his program.
His opener was Debussy’s Ballade, originally published as Ballade slave in 1891 and then revised and re-published with its current title in 1903. It inhabits an earlier tone world, closer to Fauré, than the composer’s later innovative piano works. Its lush essence was fully communicated.
Debussy concluded, Lang Lang, who remained seated at the piano during a pause to admit latecomers, launched the low G’s that usher in Liszt’s Sonata in B minor. Throughout one of the most challenging works for the piano, Lang Lang displayed a firm grasp of its lineaments and played with such technical brilliance and rhetorical flourish that the performance successfully held the audience’s attention. Hardly a cough or any other extraneous noises interrupted the cascade of sound from the Steinway D onstage. Such attention is not often won from South Florida audiences.
Someone behind me saw me following the piano score and asked: “Did he make any mistakes?” “A few,” I replied, “but no serious ones.” It was a satisfying exposition of the score, perhaps not as profound as one might have hoped, but my only cavil was that the Andante sostenuto near the end, following the final thunderous chords, was somewhat over-inflected and pulled out of shape in thrall to a bogus expressivity.
After intermission, the program was all Spanish: Albéniz; Granados; and Falla. Six of the eight dances in Albéniz’s Suite española (Op. 47) were heard first (Nos. 6 and 7 were omitted), followed by two of the six Goyescas (Op. 11) of Enrique Granados.
Albéniz’s character pieces have lots of local color in a post-Lisztian pianistic style, with interjections of flamenco gestures, and all were quite engagingly performed. Lang Lang was less successful in Granados, which is far more than colorful. In August 1917, the English critic Ernest Newman wrote of Goyescas:
“These are, in the opinion of many of us, the finest pianoforte music of our day. They display a richness of imagination and a luxuriance of technique to which none of his other works offers any parallel. Above all, the music is a gorgeous treat for the fingers, as all music is that is the perfection of writing for its particular instrument. It is difficult, but is so beautifully laid out that it is always playable: one has the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly colored jewels … it is pianoforte music of the purest kind.”
If Albéniz captures the Spanish soul, then Granados may be said to have captured the Castilian soul. There is an austerity and fatalism in Goyescas that is nowhere in Albéniz, which may explain Lang Lang’s less successful accounts of two of them: La maja y el ruiseñor (The Maiden and the Nightingale) and El fandango del candil (Fandango by Candlelight). First of all, in the suite they are third and fourth but their order was reversed, and Lang Lang’s choice to switch it seemed motivated only by the fact that the fandango has a flashy ending.Lang Lang really likes flashy endings.
Also, in both Goyescas selections the rhythmic rigor was relaxed and the mood sentimentalized. However, in his hands, the nightingale trilled attractively and its final departure in a flurry of trills was suggested quite beautifully.
Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance is another piece with a flashy ending and long was a staple of Arthur Rubinstein’s repertoire, but he embellished the composer’s own piano version with some virtuoso flourishes. Lang Lang played the original (more or less) and did so noisily and rather unmusically, but he knew his audience and received the usual standing ovation, after which he played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor (Op. Posth.) a little swooningly but respectably.