Music Review: Lang Lang - The Chopin Album

This article was first published at Blogcritics

If, like me, your earliest image of Frédéric Chopin comes from Hollywood's A Song to Remember. If the first thing the composer's name suggests is a handsome young man seated at a grand piano on a series of concert stages growing paler and sicker as he plays, wiping the sweat from his brow, and eventually coughing up that one ominous spot of blood on the piano keys, the gorgeous music he was playing has likely embedded itself in the depths of your psyche just as it has in mine. Of course Cornel Wilde playing Chopin was not the virtuoso playing the piano. That was Jose Iturbi certainly one of the most popular of the classical pianists of the period, a man that was to put his recording of Chopin's "Polonaise  in A-Flat" on the charts for a reported four years. And when probably the most popular classical pianist of the current day, Lang Lang, releases his first album devoted entirely to the solo piano works of Chopin, it promises perhaps another classical chart topper.

Lang Lang is nothing if not a charismatic performer, and if there are those that find his playing a bit too flamboyant for their taste, their voices are generally lost in the pianist's overwhelming success with the public. Audiences love him. Besides Chopin's music as much as the music of any of the great composers lends itself to flamboyance, Lang Lang and Chopin would seem a match made in heaven. The Chopin Album is the proof of the pudding.

The album begins with the second set of Chopin's Études (op.25), a dozen studies that the pianist suggests not only provide "training for . . . many elements of technique," but help "develop how your mind works, and how you control the different layers of your emotional response." They are not simply finger exercises, exercises in technique; as the liner notes point out, they are musically sophisticated studies sitting at the "center of Chopin's repertoire." Lang Lang plays them with patented skill and panache.

The album includes three nocturnes, the Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise (op. 22), the famous Grande Valse Brillante in E-Flat Major (op.18), and one of the best known show pieces in the Chopin canon, the two minute, one "Minute Waltz." The nocturnes demonstrate that the pianist is capable of restraint when he wants it. The waltzes get the more showy treatment.  As a bonus, for crossover fans there is an encore of Tristesse in duet with Danish singer/songwriter Oh Land. If one needs something to complain about, perhaps another solo piano piece would have been preferable.

In general like Lang's previously released  two disc set,Live In Vienna, The Chopin Album is likely to please those of us who were at first naïve enough to believe that it was Cornel Wilde playing that piano and thrilled to  the playing of Jose Iturbi when we knew better, if not always the critics with finer palates.

A note to those of you too young to have been around in 1945 to see Wilde, Merle Oberon and Paul Muni in that faux Chopin biopic A Song to Remember (indeed for those of you who want to look back on the days of your youth), you can see it complete on YouTube, albeit with Spanish  subtitles. It's worth watching if only for the music.

Music Review: Live in Vienna Lang Lang

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Charisma, flair, drama, passion—these are the terms most often used to describe 27 year old Chinese pianist virtuoso, Lang Lang. He has star quality. He steps out on stage and the atmosphere is electric. And besides all that, he can play with the best of them. It is not all that strange then, that at a time when the audience for classical music is aging and seats in concert halls are often going unfilled, a musician like Lang Lang would be touted as the great hope for the future of serious music. It is not all that strange that Sony would sign him to a three million dollar recording contract.

Live in Vienna is the first fruit of that contract. The two disc CD was recorded during February and March of this year at Vienna's historic Musikverein, perhaps best known to American audiences for the annual PBS broadcast of the New Year's concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic. The venue is of interest because Sony is also releasing the recital on DVD and Blue Ray, and the venerable setting is a visual symbol of classical music's traditions. The Blue Ray will include a 3D video in an attempt to merge tradition with new technologies.

The first disc contains two of Beethoven's sonatas, the early Sonata No. 3 in C Major, Op. 2 and the much more well known Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, the "Appasionata." In the notes to the CD, Lang Lang says that although Sonata No. 3 is an early work, it already shows signs of the composer's maturity and the strength of his personality. The "Appasionata," on the other hand is one of those works central not only to Beethoven, but central to the repertoire. Although some may ask why another recording of such an old chestnut, it is truly a work that has the kind of emotional impact especially suited to the bravura style of the pianist. Lang Lang says: "It's like an enormous volcano beneath the surface, a dark environment, hidden and needing to be explored." And explore it he does, both with evocative dynamics and rhythmic nuance.

Disc 2 begins with Isaac Albeniz's Iberia, Book I in three movements. The pianist emphasizes the varied rhythms in the work and notes the folk influences as well as the soft focus coloring of the French Impressionists. This is followed by Sonata No. 7 in B-Flat Major, Op. 83 by Prokofiev, sometimes called the "Stalingrad," one of the "War Sonatas." As passionate in a modern idiom as the Beethoven's are in the Romantic, the piece gives the artist an opportunity to recreate what he calls a "warlike mood."

Three Chopin encores conclude the recital. There is an etude and a waltz, but the central piece is the Polonaise No. 6 in A-Flat Major, Op. 53, the famous "Heroic" Polonaise. This, of course, is one of the great piano show pieces. Like the "Appasionata," it offers the pianist an opportunity to showcase his skills in the context of all those virtuosos who have gone before. Lang Lang's performance has all the drama of the best of them.

Live in Vienna offers a nice variety while focusing on the strengths of the artist. There is a mix of the less familiar and the well known. There is plenty of opportunity for skilled dexterity. There is a range of emotion. Lang Lang knows how to choose his repertoire, and it is all played with a consummate skill and technique. If this CD is any indication, he may indeed be just what is needed to develop a new audience for classical music; he is without doubt just the tonic necessary to reinvigorate the old one. Three million may be just about the right price for such a talent.