Chinese celebrity pianist Lang Lang combines an eastern sensibility with a western musical tradition, and he wears his heart on his shiny suit sleeves, writes Stephen Moss
Lang Lang is having a nap. He's just arrived in chilly Zaragoza from Berlin - a two hour-flight to Barcelona followed by a three-hour drive - and is due to play a concert at the city's gleaming new hall in a couple of hours. Foolishly, he's agreed to spend most of what little time he has in this laid-back Spanish city with me.
He sidles into the hotel lounge to meet me, looking not like the world's wealthiest, busiest, most sought-after concert pianist, but like the lead singer in a boy band: expensive black leather jacket, jeans, trendy haircut. He has a fleshy face, bulging eyes and an air of absolute self-confidence. After a couple of minutes you feel you've known him forever, but it may be practised glad-handing on his part. I see later how he works a crowd of well-wishers after the concert, wanting to love and be loved.
He is tired and orders a glass of hot milk - a concept the waitress finds almost impossible to grasp - and eats the biscuits that come with my coffee. (Later, when I jump in his car to go back to his hotel for a post-concert dinner, I find a box with a half-eaten salami sandwich inside.) His continent-hopping schedule, with 130-plus concerts a year, is ridiculous, and over dinner his Spanish manager chides him by saying he will be "the richest pianist in the cemetery". But Lang Lang is 25, an age that barely admits tiredness even when you are exhausted. "If you think you're tired, then you're tired," he says in his occasionally wayward English, which mixes a transatlantic accent with a Germanic word order.
"Even if I'm tired, when I get on stage it stops. I try to play my best every concert, I really try. I never give it up. In a concert you cannot give 50 per cent of what you have, you have to give 100 per cent, always 100 per cent. Every concert is like looking at a great Premier League footballer. They are so passionate about what they're doing, and this is what we need in the music world, too." Lang Lang refers to the (English) Premiership (soccer league) several times, and over dinner is fascinated to hear that his Spanish manager's son is trying to forge a career in hip-hop. These are probably not subjects that would captivate Alfred Brendel or Andras Schiff, and they help to explain why Lang Lang has become a global phenomenon. He is young, plugged-in, dynamic; more than that, he is Chinese, combining an eastern sensibility with a western musical tradition. In August, the day before the Olympics begin, he gets to carry the torch 200m through the streets of Beijing. What other classical musician can compete with that level of celebrity?
HIS PIANISM IS more open to question, and some pundits have been cruel. Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic of the New York Times, described his playing as "often incoherent, self-indulgent and slam-bang crass", and likened him to a "hammy actor". The veteran American pianist Earl Wild called him "the J-Lo of the piano" - all sheen, no substance. You either love Lang Lang's stage style or hate it. He wears a sparkly suit that dances in the spotlights, emotes wildly, wipes away a tear at the conclusion of Liszt's transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, throws his arms wide apart after a climax in the Schumann Fantasie. It is piano-playing as theatre and not to the taste of those who think art should be understated, showmanship held in check, sparkly suits left to those who seek to fill the chasm left by the death of Liberace.
Lang Lang says he no longer cares what people say about his heart-on-shiny-sleeve style. "A few years ago, I tried to take some advice to see how I could control myself. But it doesn't work because I'm not playing the music as I feel it; I'm playing the music the way that people tell me to do it. The important thing for me is to analyse the music and understand the composers and their work, rather than worry about body movement." He insists there is no calculation in the way he plays. "When I was five that was the way I played. This is who I am; it's my signature. I never think about making an impression on the audience. I just go to the stage and play my best. I've experienced many times that if you are determined to show people what you can do and make them excited, then you will be a loser because you are trying too hard. We can all spot a fake."
The challenge for Lang Lang is that he's a young artist with extreme public exposure. He accepts that he is not yet the finished article and seeks out great artists from whom he believes he can learn. In Berlin, he saw his mentor Daniel Barenboim, and also enthuses about a recent recording with Placido Domingo and a planned recording with Cecilia Bartoli. "It's important for me to work with singers," he says. "The problem with the piano is that it's easy to forget that you have to breathe in and out. Your hands don't need to breathe. When you play with singers, they show you how to create the phrase." He accepts that he may become a different pianist, but he shies away from saying he will be a "better" pianist. "Musically, of course, you will never finish. There is always something new. There's a lot of room to grow for sure, but nobody knows whether I will really be playing better. It's hard to know what better is. I can play differently and understand music more deeply, but that doesn't mean that I will play it better. Some great musicians are not good players." Lang Lang is happy to proclaim his technical brilliance. For him, it counts for something, whereas some critics would discard virtuosity along with the sparkly suits. I like his bluntness when I ask him whether age makes for more searching pianism: "Eighty per cent of pianists play pretty bad after they turn 60." Discuss with reference to most of the pianists who currently dominate concert halls. Their hands get slower, he says, but they can always give up Rach 3 and play pieces with fewer notes.
In Zaragoza, he offers a programme of dizzying variety: a Mozart sonata, the Schumann Fantasie, five traditional Chinese pieces, part of Goyescas by Granados, lots of Liszt and, as an encore, a poignant Chopin étude that finally quietens a spluttery audience; a formal first half, a richly riotous second.
Unlike many pianists, who are noted for their excellence in one area of the repertoire, Lang Lang covers the whole territory. This could be admirably adventurous or dangerously latitudinarian. He is a natural Lisztian, but does his Mozart have the requisite lightness of touch, or his Schumann the necessary structural rigour to bring all the Fantasie's wild excesses into some sort of logical shape? Can anyone excel in everything? "I admire people who just play great Chopin or great Schubert," he says, "but that's not me. That will never be my style because I don't think that way." While saying firmly that he will stay in the classical tradition rather than do crossover, he is keen to try the odd experiment. "I'm a classical pianist; I'm not a crossover pianist. From the beginning, that is clear. But if there is a good movie soundtrack project or a new work, maybe written for me and another artist who is not classical, I'd like to try it."
LANG LANG WAS born in Shenyang in north-eastern China just as the country was relaxing after the end of the cultural revolution and it was suddenly OK to commune with western music. His musician father was determined that his only son would be a great pianist. Lang Lang started learning at three, won a local piano competition at six, moved to Beijing with his father to study at the Central Conservatory of Music at 10, was awarded a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia at 15, became famous two years later when he was a last-minute replacement for an indisposed soloist in a performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and by the age of 19 had conquered Carnegie Hall.
This apparently seamless progress masks a turbulent and impoverished upbringing. When he gained a place at the conservatory, he and his father moved to a cramped, shared apartment in Beijing, while his mother, a telephone engineer, stayed in Shenyang to earn the money to pay for his musical education. The sacrifices his parents were making put immense pressure on the youngster, and there are stories of his father flying into a rage if he felt his protege was underperforming. "My father is a very, very pushing parent," he admits, "but at the same time he's smart. He always reminded me of the joy of music."
Did the young Lang Lang have to make his own sacrifice - his childhood and adolescence? "A little bit, yes," he says. "Not the whole of it, but half, let's say. For me, the good thing was I really enjoyed playing. Not everybody enjoys practice. I wouldn't say I love practice, but I don't hate it. I can manage it, and I can find interesting things in the practice session. This helped me a lot. I would have lost interest if everything was just pushing."
Despite his role as a public face of the Beijing Olympics, when I ask him whether he feels rootedly Chinese he is guarded, preferring a cliche beloved of globetrotting classical musicians. "I'm Chinese, yes, but I'm really a citizen of the world." He recently bought a home in New York and says it is the city he knows best. Nor does he rule out taking US citizenship at some point. But he is sure to keep a foothold in China, where his fan base is vast: there are now an estimated 36 million youngsters learning the piano across the country, all desperate to be the next Lang Lang. That's a lot of pianism - and a lot of pushing.
Does being a phenomenon get in the way of being a pianist; can adulation undermine art? I ask if he hopes that one day the rock-star aura - his vast following in China, the snake of enthusiasts at the stage door in Zaragoza, his worldwide contracts with Audi and Rolex (western companies prize the access he gives them to the Asian market), his role as Unicef's youngest goodwill ambassador - will recede, so he can throw away the leather jacket and concentrate on being an artist. "The most important thing about my career is not my leather jacket," he says. "It's the way I am making music. That's why people get interested. I don't need a leather jacket. I'm only wearing it because it's cold today. I believe that, without or with, I'm the same person."
He says he works hard to stay normal. "This is like a fantasy life. Not a good fantasy life either. It's exhausting: you take a plane, drive to the hotel and give a concert two hours later. Then you eat and take another plane. It's a boring life, a very boring life if you do it for 10 years. I have this BlackBerry with me, so I'm always in contact with friends. I'm talking and joking with them. You need to find something to do, not just think about today's concert, tomorrow's concert. That would make you go crazy."
Lang Lang is not crazy; indeed, he seems worryingly normal and utterly nerveless. But by midnight even he, the 25-year-old who can will away tiredness, admits to being shattered. He says the piano he was playing had made a relatively "small sound" and that he had to work hard to project it in the 2,000-seat hall. The next day he has to be up at 6am to head back to Barcelona and take a plane to Stockholm to give a masterclass. He leaves me drinking red wine and his manager tucking into a vast chocolate dessert. Who would choose art over life, fame over well-fed, sleep-filled anonymity? (- Guardian service)
• Lang Lang plays at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Wednesday, February 20th