This coming Friday, the 8th, is the date set for the quadrennial celebration of global excellence. I refer of course to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. I’m very much looking forward to it. The video projector (Japanese) is all set up in my living room. Tiger beer (from Singapore) and Reese’s peanut butter cups (from Pennsylvania) will be consumed. I saw the footage from the rehearsal that was leaked on the internet, so I know that we can expect synchronised placard waving of a standard that will make the North Koreans look like amateurs. But we all knew that anyway, right?
The New Yorker (August 4, 2008) reports the rumour that the pianist Lang Lang will be performing on excellence night. If it were Britain (and in four years time, it will be), then we’d be getting Elton John (and maybe in four years time, we will be), so perhaps I shouldn’t make any crisp remarks. But Lang Lang? Really?
Lang Lang’s performances consist mostly of representations of the western classical piano repertoire. He also does some Chinese stuff, moulded into piano-friendly form. I heard him play in London (the Royal Festival Hall) last year. It was awful: the kind of playing you find you can’t applaud. Literally: when the recital stops, your hands do not come together. Of course, not everyone who was there that evening felt the same way: around half of the audience gave him a standing ovation. The standers and clappers were thoroughly mixed in with those who weren’t standing and weren’t clapping, and that was spectacular in itself. There were plenty of (apparently) Chinese people in the audience: were they clapping more enthusiastically than the others? It was hard to tell.
Why is Lang Lang a bad pianist? Part of the problem is the grandstanding; the sequins, the jumping up and down. Much worse is his apparent antagonism to the lyrical or textural subtlety of his material. Liszt was notorious in his youth for his showmanship, but he was not just a pianist, he was also a composer. In maturity, he produced pieces of extraordinary lightness and harmonic beauty: Les jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este, for example. Liszt’s trajectory echoes that of Beethoven: consider Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, for example. A pianist who wants to do justice to these compositions needs technique, obviously, but the crucial thing is to aim for a kind of neutrality of interpretation. This is because there are more things happening in the music than any performer can give emphasis to ‘in real time’. But Lang Lang has a strong tendency to add his programme to the programme. So you get an enormous amount of unexpected speeding up and slowing down (rubato is the term for the polite version of this behaviour). Lang Lang can do the dolcissimo but it’s usually a tease; he really wants to go for loud. But with the piano, there is a limit beyond which all your kinetic energy just gets you more harshness, not more excitement. In short, Lang Lang often bully wanks his instrument.
So now the Olympics. Is it a good fit for Lang Lang? It might be, in the same way that Tiger Woods seems to be a good fit for Accenture. Tiger Woods displays non-substantive excellence. What’s more, his achievement in this is unarguable: there’s no doubt that he often wins. However, what he wins at is a contest of smacking a small dimpled sphere a certain distance so that it goes in a marked hole and not some other place. He wins because he does this more reliably than the other guys. I don’t mean to be tendentious when I say that no matter how calm, conscientious and psychologically ‘well-sorted’ may be its participants, golf really is meaningless. Nothing is meant. That’s surely the major part of the appeal for Accenture, and the reason that it’s Tiger Woods who appears in their advertising material, not actors in experimental theatre (even though, as it happens, Accenture also sponsors experimental theatre). Tiger’s excellence is conveniently empty.
Likewise with Lang Lang. Far from writing his own lyrics (just imagine the potential for an embarrassing Bono moment) he’s not even a singer, so there are no words. Instead, Lang Lang hits a lot of notes. A lot of the time, they’re the right notes: like Tiger, Lang Lang has a statistical edge. He meets targets.
There are further comparisons that could be drawn. Tiger Woods is from a minority group in the US: that is, he’s black. Since he’s also a winner, this fact makes him sponsor-friendly. Lang Lang is from a poor background, a fact that only achieves its full potential for a sponsor of excellence when we’re told about it, as in this passage from the New Yorker article:
Winters are long, damp and cold in Beijing; at night, while Lang practiced, his father would get in his bed and warm it for him. They often slept wearing nearly all the clothes they owned. Lang Guoren [Lang Lang’s father] would wake at five and lock himself in the bathroom down the hall so that when his son woke he would not have to wait in line before washing up [washing himself] and beginning his day of practicing. … When he was ten, [Lang Lang] was accepted at the Beijing conservatory.
So we should expect to hear often of Lang Lang’s personal history. Of course, the issue is complicated by the tendency people have to write their own myths, and often well before any patron or media channel has gotten near them.
Is there anything else that might make Lang Lang the right sort of material to be making a star appearance on excellence night? Although what he does is mostly unthreatening, Lang Lang still has latitude for surprise, and that’s important. It’s a simple, visceral thing: from minute to minute, you just never know with Lang Lang. Will he be manic, crazy loud, or will he be tender, soulful? The unsubtlety that undermines his pianism gives him ‘crowd appeal’. Maybe he meets a physiological need: relief from tedium. And what kind of sponsor would be against that? It would be like being against food when there’s hungry people. Tiger doesn’t always win, it would be bo-ring if he did. And Lang Lang might do his million notes per second freak out at any moment. Did you see …? It was unbelieveable …
Like I said, I’ll be watching, so we can share our impressions later.
Feed: A Fistful of Euros
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:22 pm
There was a documentary on, of course, Arte recently about Lang Lang. He struck me as the personification of Chinese chauvinism. The Chinese dream as opposed to the American dream.
I am by no means an expert on classical music, but sometimes I get the impression (as indeed with ballet) that it is really an olympic discipline. All technique, all of the time. Performance above sentiment. And I have heard, from pianists, that this is very often a problem with Asian pianists. They are absolutley brilliant when it comes to technique, but they are lacking in “feeling”.
Do you know Afanassiev?
August 4th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Only the name, very vaguely, and I’ve yet to hear him. But it looks as though he does chamber music, so straight away he’s a different kind of pianist.
What would be nice is if Lang Lang were to take all his concert fees and retire for ten years or so. He could then re-emerge as a much better musician.
August 7th, 2008 at 6:15 am
You’re right. For one thing, the Chinese can’t think or feel for themselves. Only think and feel the power of raging Nationalism for a country who can’t recognize human rights.
Seriously, in China. It’s hard to get a good “out of the box” opinion from anybody.