NCH, Dublin
The history of extreme pianists is a long one. Mozart and Beethoven engaged in musical duels with rivals, Clementi in the case of Mozart, Wölfl in the case of Beethoven. It was a pianist, the great Liszt, who gave the first genuine solo recital, keeping the stage to himself, without a supporting act. Later in the 19th century, Anton Rubinstein surveyed the history of piano music in seven programmes, the second of which ran to eight sonatas by Beethoven. Vladimir de Pachmann behaved so eccentrically on stage that George Bernard Shaw lampooned “his well-known pantomimic performance, with accompaniments by Chopin”. Vladimir Horowitz delighted in arrangements which made it seem as if he needed three hands to play them.
China’s most successful pianist export, Lang Lang, is best considered in this lineage. There’s the extreme choreography of his gesturing for a start, and his fondness for musical effects that pander to the gallery. The extremes of his musical responses seem to have upset critics as much as they have delighted audiences. And extreme technical facility is something he just allows his listeners to take for granted.
This concert at the National Concert Hall was interesting on a number of fronts. He played works by three composers he had never tackled in Dublin before. And for the first time here he played some Beethoven, the early and overtly virtuosic Sonata in C, Op 2 No 3, and the stormy Appassionata Sonata.
In many ways, his playing of Beethoven seemed almost circumspect. Yes, his tempo in the first movement of the C major Sonata did fluctuate rather more than seemed wise. And he did add a low note or two that Beethoven didn’t write. But, if anything, he played down the sharpness of contrast for which Beethoven is so famous. His most extreme moments were not ones of flashiness or thunder, but in some especially soft playing, much softer than the music called for but magical all the same.
If the feeling in the first half was almost one of sobriety, of exciting pieces kept firmly in check, the mood after the interval was quite different. In the first book of Albéniz's Iberia the languor of Evocaciónseemed to go too far, and the virtuosity in Corpus Christi en Sevillawas at the expense of the music.
It was in Prokofiev’s notoriously demanding Seventh Sonata that Lang Lang’s strengths and weakness were most clearly revealed. He played the famous closing Toccata with a relentless violence that was guaranteed to bring the house down. But the narrative of the first movement was poorly projected, with a tendency to favour incident over plot, to glory in the delight of the moment at the expense of the cogency of the whole. It’s an approach which, like a Hollywood blockbuster, however exciting it may be, doesn’t have much to say.
