Lang Lang's latest incarnations

Here is my Tuesday, July 22, 2008 suntimes.com review of Sunday evening's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with Lang Lang at the Ravinia Festival.

Lang Lang shows serious artistry in performance with CSO

BY ANDREW PATNER

The international piano phenom Lang Lang was all of 17 when he caught the world's attention as a last-minute stand-in for André Watts at Ravinia's centennial concert in 1999.  Though he is just 26 now, he has had several lifetimes of experience in the intervening eight years: Regular performances in every music capital, awards, riches, films, a new autobiography (presumably the first of several) -- even his own black and gold Adidas sneakers.

But those who would write him off as a globalist Liberace or classical rock star miss the seriousness that is mixed in with the glamor, the artistry that can cut through the hype.  Sunday evening at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chinese-born pianist played both the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto, Op. 18, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (an announced Chopin work was dropped without explanation) in performances that demonstrated the complexity of this audience conqueror.

Pianist Lang Lang proves his artistry at Ravinia. 

It was Daniel Barenboim who tamed Lang Lang and cured him of many of the piano bench antics that had been encouraged by earlier mentors.  But critics also would say that Barenboim steered him to focus at times on sound alone and a soloist-centered style of exploration while playing.  Certainly his Gershwin found a way to combine the work's immediate exuberance with almost academic demonstrations of harmonic nuggets in the jazzy score.  

If you were ready to surrender to Lang Lang's adventures -- and I bet Gershwin himself would have done so --you were richly rewarded.  If you wanted a historic re-creation of the composer's 1936 performance of the piece at Ravinia, well, it's unlikely you bought a ticket anyway.

The Rachmaninoff again showed a performer stripped of his external theatrics but overly indulging his dreamy side, especially in the work's famous slow movement.  Conductor James Conlon could not or would not build the necessary tension in the orchestral accompaniment, which further fed Lang Lang's tendency toward dissipation.

Conlon's important contribution in recent years has been his focus, first in Germany and now at Ravinia, the Los Angeles Opera (where he is also music director) and the Juilliard School, on European composers whose lives and work were disrupted or destroyed by the Nazis.  This summer's focus is on Franz Schreker (left), an opera composer whom historians see as a "missing link" between Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.  The Austrian-born Schreker, who died just shy of 56 of a stroke in Berlin in 1934 induced by his professional persecution in Germany, had a marvelously open ear that led him to incorporate French and other ideas into the German Romantic idiom.  He even made song settings of poems by Walt Whitman.

While his operas are too huge and difficult to stage here, Conlon had programmed the lovely 1900 string orchestra Intermezzo, Op. 8, at the annual Ravinia gala Saturday. The concert Sunday opened with Schreker's 1916 Chamber Symphony for 23 solo instruments, including harp, celesta and harmonium.  Schreker was searching -- in this 22-minute piece and in his other works -- for ways of capturing unique sounds, much as Debussy did in his late works.  Beneath the surface of the beautiful score is a rhythmic and tonal complexity that requires the expertise of a conductor such as Peter Eötvos and was missing in the Ravinia performance.

The festival continued its successful experiment with simultaneous video projection to screens on the lawn and on either side of the Pavilion stage. With WTTW-Channel 11's Michael Lorentz at the production controls, the opportunity to see Lang Lang and CSO soloists in closeup was fascinating and never distracting.