The album title, “My Piano Hero” (never mind the cover photo), is enough to make you gag, and really doesn’t do justice to the quality of Lang Lang’s pianism. On the other hand, I was shopping for packing tape the other day in my local Brooklyn hardware store, and I suddenly heard this version of the Grand galop chromatique come from a boom-box behind the sales counter. “So you like Liszt?” I asked the clerk. “He was the Elvis of the 1800s,” he told me solemnly. And so he was. Perhaps that explains the concept, though Liszt himself would have objected.
The slower numbers in this recital are gorgeous. Lang Lang has a way of stroking those left-hand arpeggiated accompaniments in the Liebestraum, the Consolation, Un sospiro, and the Ave Maria that allows the melody to really float as if weightless. Liszt himself used to say of such moments that the music must “hover” (“Es muss schweben”), and so it does.
Lang Lang also has virtuosity to burn in La campanella and the two Hungarian Rhapsodies, but in both No. 6 and the Grand galop chromatique his excessive rubato risks vulgarity. We know that Liszt himself liked rubato in lyrical music especially, but there are times when a strong, simple rhythm is what he requires, and anything more just sounds cheap.
Sticking the concerto onto a program of solo works might look a bit odd, but it fits the “greatest hits” concept of the program as a whole, and the performance is a very good one. The need to coordinate piano and orchestra keeps Lang Lang’s tendency to rhythmic waywardness in check (except where it’s wanted, as in the Quasi adagio), while the deft scherzo and dazzling march finale have plenty of sparkle and bravura. Taste issues aside in packaging and presentation, this program largely delivers on its promise. [10/18/2011]
