2 May 2003

London Philharmonic Orchestra / Tadaaki Otaka

Lang Lang – Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No.1

by Richard Morrison

Royal Festival Hall, London

“A dazzling performance from the Chinese prodigy Lang Lang”

Mendelssohn’s dapper little First Piano Concerto is hardly the north face of the Eiger for a top soloist. But Lang Lang the 20-year-old Chinese sensation who’s so good they had to name him twice, did enough on Wednesday to show why practically every music critic in America (where he is now based) drools over his every arpeggio.

For much of the time he skimmed with the lightest of touches over the ivories, as though dusting a harp with a feather. That preposterously breezy finale – an overture in search of an operetta – can rarely have been delivered with such insouciant grace at such breathtaking pace.

But like Muhammad Ali, he knows how to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. He has the capacity to pounce on single notes or chords, often right in the middle of a dazzling run, and tilt the phrase in an unexpected direction with a well-placed accent. More impressive still, he managed to inject a moment of poetic reverie, even of questioning, into the opening of the slow movement, before Mendelssohn’s big, bland bourgeois cello tune swept all before it.

Yes, there’s gold in them fingers. Lang already has a Deutsche Grammophon contract in his pocket; his first DG recording, out next month, couples this concerto with the Tchaikovsky No.1 – which by amazing coincidence, is the piece he plays at the First Night of the Proms in July.

I hope he also treats the Prommers to the encore he presented here. Returning to the stage with a man clutching an erhu (a two-stringed Chinese fiddle, gripped between the knees and bowed like a viol) he announced: “This is my father”. The two of them promptly played an astonishing erhu-and-piano showpiece – virtually a miniature Chinese opera without words - apparently called Two Competing Horsemen. Lang senior is every bit as virtuosic as his son; the slurpy, syrupy sound of the galloping erhu could become the surprise hit of the summer.