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Changing his tune - www.chinadaily.com.cn
Submitted by admin on February 3, 2012 - 10:51am
in
Piano prodigy Lang Lang will spend less time touring and more working on charitable and educational projects. Liu Yuhan reports.
Superstar pianist Lang Lang will slow down his tempo this year, decreasing the number of concerts from his usual 150 a year to 120 or even fewer than 100. He hopes to devote more time to helping others achieve the same music dreams he has through charity and education, he tells China Daily. "I'm turning 30 this year and - as a traditional Chinese saying goes - you stand up when you turn 30," Lang says in New York after a concert at the Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, where he played Bartok's Piano Concerto No 2 with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic.
The private multifunction arts complex Lang Lang Music World opened in Guangdong province's Shenzhen city at the beginning of this year. Its stated goal is to cultivate the next generation of musicians through educational programs.
"I want to ignite the passions of many other young piano enthusiasts to pursue their love for music," Lang says.
The institution has opened about 50 practice rooms, and most teachers are ready to work before student recruitment has finished.
Another branch is slated to open soon in Chongqing.
The schools follow the 2008 founding of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation in New York.
Lang hopes the foundation can inspire the next generation of musicians and financially assist youth who share his childhood dreams of music.
The foundation currently sponsors seven young scholars. Two are from Hong Kong, another two are from Europe and three hail from the United States.
It runs several children's programs, including the "Piano Masterclasses" and the "101 Pianists", in which young scholars can study under Lang, attend social musical events and cooperate with other musicians.
The foundation's executive director Leszek Barwinski says it also functions as a bridge for Sino-US cultural exchanges.
"We believe that music is a universal language, and it can open opportunities for communication, understanding and acceptance as we strive to ignite the passion of youth in music," Barwinski says.
The foundation will host the Lang Lang Charity Music Competition at Carnegie Hall in October and select two more young scholars to expand its team, Barwinski says.
Lang, who was born in Liaoning's provincial capital Shenyang in 1982, to a professional musician and telephone technician, says his passion for music started when, at age 2, he saw the Tom and Jerry episode The Cat Concerto, featuring Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 2.
His parents later bought him a piano that cost "half their yearly income", he says.
"Now, I hope I can help build a platform for these kids to receive systematic training in music," he says.
"There are two different types of children I want to help most. The first type are those who are very talented but lack financial support - I will do the best I can to provide the maximum of financial aid to these children until they fulfill their dreams. The second type comprises those who have fewer financial concerns but don't have access to qualified piano teachers."
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) appointed Lang as International Goodwill Ambassador in 2004 in recognition of his education and charity work.
Lang and three children ages 6-10 from the foundation appeared on Oprah's Search for the World's Most Smartest and Most Talented Kids.
Lang considers his charity and education work to be his second career.
"Music makes life better," he says.
"It heals, unites and inspires. So, I will keep working on my music school and the foundation, and find new ways to develop the world of music for children."
Lang regularly sells out recitals and concerts around the world and is the first Chinese pianist to be engaged by the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and top US orchestras. His albums have made the top classical and many pop charts worldwide.
His album of the First and Fourth Beethoven Piano Concertos debuted in the No 1 spot on the Classical Billboard Chart. Lang is also the first Chinese artist to be nominated as Best Instrumental Soloist at the 2007 Grammy Awards.
He also performed for Chinese President Hu Jintao and US President Barack Obama at the White House State Dinner last year.
Now, he'll likely be spending more time helping underprivileged Chinese children learn to play the keys rather than mixing with the key players of international society.
- 30 reads
Don't miss the Chinese New Year Gala Concert from Lincoln Center on Phoenix TV
Submitted by harpplayer on February 2, 2012 - 9:37am
in
The first Chinese New Year Gala Concert in New York City by the New York Philharmonic features Lang Lang and many great Chinese artists will be broadcast on Pheonix Chinese channel on February 4th at 4:00PM and repeated once at 11:45PM.
- 46 reads
WQXR: Live Chinese New Year Webcast 7:30 EST
Submitted by admin on January 24, 2012 - 10:26am
in
The New York Philharmonic will celebrate the Year of the Dragon by performing Chinese music with pianist Lang Lang, special guest choir Quintessenso and the conductor Long Yu.
The program includes composer Bao Yuankai's China Air Suite, Li Huanzhi's Spring Festival Overture and Extase for oboe and orchestra by composer Chen Qigang, who composed the Beijing Olympic Games theme song, You and Me.
The Mongolian children's choir will don traditional attire and sing folk songs. The program will also feature flutist Tang Junqiao, playing bamboo flute. Lang Lang will bring his customary dazzle to Liszt's Piano Concerto No 1.
Yu is the most active and powerful conductor in China, being the music director of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra.
To view more information about this special live broadcast, please click here.
- 153 reads
Lang Lang Celebrates Year Of The Dragon With New York Concerts Broadcast Live Online
Submitted by admin on January 24, 2012 - 8:57am
in
Lang Lang, the renowned Chinese pianist, is celebrating the Year of the Dragon with two concerts in New York, both broadcast live on the Web site of WQXR, the New York classical music station.
In the first, to be broadcast at 6 p.m. EST January 23, Mr. Lang will perform traditional songs and Chinese New Year favorites with Quintessenso, a chorus of children age 5 to 12 from Mongolia, in northeastern China, in its first appearance outside of China.
The second concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. EST on January 24; it will also be shown later in the week on Phoenix Television, a commercial station in China.
The second concert, with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, will be conducted by Long Yu, artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic. In addition to Lang Lang and Quintessenso, Tang Junqiao, a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music of the dizi, the Chinese traditional flute, will perform. This concert will be the New York Philharmonic’s first-ever gala concert in honor of the Chinese New Year.
The January 24 program will feature traditional Chinese music, including a “Spring Festival Overture,” suite of Mongolian folk songs and works for bamboo flute and orchestra.
Lang Lang will play Liszt’s Piano Concert No. 1, which he performed on a CD released last year, “Liszt: My Piano Hero,” commemorating the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s birth.
Mr. Lang said he will perform the Liszt January 24 because “it’s one of the best pieces for a major gala event. The energy is really high, it’s almost like a great bottle of champagne.”
The Chinese New Year celebrates the beginning of spring, Mr. Lang added, “when everything is reborn and restarts. I like the idea when the midnight bell rings and the wind from spring comes.”
Also performing at the concert January 24 will be Liang Wang, the New York Philharmonic’s principal oboist, a native of Qing Dao, China, who studied music in the United States. He will play “Extase” for oboe and orchestra by Chen Qigang.
Mr. Wang said “Extase,” composed 30 years ago, was “very difficult” to perform and “requires tremendous endurance,” with folk tunes he said would appeal to both Eastern and Western audiences.
The concert will be a special occasion for Mr. Wang personally: His parents, who still live in China, will attend; it will be the first time they will celebrate the New Year together in 15 years, and it will also be his father’s 60th birthday.
The broadcasts of both concerts are part of a special “China in New York” festival being held by WQXR through January 27.
The festival, also a first, will include a podcast on the growth of classical music in China and the challenges contemporary composers and musicians face; a slideshow and report on new concert hall construction in China; a Mandarin-language program hosted by composer Huang Ruo on contemporary music-making in New York; two 24-hour marathons of traditional and contemporary music by Chinese-born composers; and audio portraits of Chinese performers and composers, including Lang Lang, Chen Yi, Huang Ruo, Zhou Long and others.
- 155 reads
Photos from NASDAQ Event
Submitted by admin on January 23, 2012 - 8:43am
in
More images from the event can be viewed here: http://www.langlang.com/us/photos/site-galleries/nasdaq-event
- 86 reads
Meeting Complex Bartok With Ease and Imagination
Submitted by admin on January 23, 2012 - 8:29am
in
The superstar pianist Lang Lang may shamelessly cultivate a flamboyant persona. And he has been criticized widely for exaggerated expressivity. Still, no fair-minded person can deny that Mr. Lang has stupendous technique and keen musical instincts.
There was no showing off on Wednesday night at Avery Fisher Hall when Mr. Lang played Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic. This exhilarating 25-minute work, completed in 1931, ingeniously blends the modernist and folkloric elements of Bartok’s language. Pianists consider it among the most technically demanding of all concertos. Mr. Lang gave a brilliant performance, not just glittering and incisive but joyous and smart.
Mr. Lang, who can play anything easily, seemed intensely focused on this occasion. He performed reading from the score with a page turner to assist him: a sight his ardent fans rarely see.
For all the musical complexities of this piece, Bartok intended it to be an exuberant concerto in the grand tradition. If the audience senses that a pianist is struggling to play it, the effect is lost. Mr. Lang dispatched the piece with uncanny ease and abundant imagination.
On its surface the first movement, in which the piano is accompanied only by percussion, woodwinds and brasses, is a breathless folk dance. The piano part teems with clusters and crisscrossing octaves. Fractured brass fanfares alternate with jagged bursts of piano chords, which Mr. Lang not only executed with aplomb but also voiced with care to bring out the melodic line or inner details. In one passage of mysterious rolled chords, he teased out an Eastern quality. The crazed cadenza was all the more ferocious for the ping and clarity of Mr. Lang’s playing.
The slow second movement begins with a somber, choralelike melody for strings alone, which the Philharmonic played with hushed richness. When the piano entered, Mr. Lang’s shaping of the fragile theme was beguilingly simple and sensitive. And in the restless finale, another kind of folk-tinged dance, Mr. Lang, backed by the inspired orchestra, played dazzlingly, sometimes bouncing eagerly on the piano bench as the driving music surged.
In recent seasons New Yorkers have heard two major pianists, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Andras Schiff, play this concerto with commanding technique and more distinctive musicianship. Still, the sheer exuberance of Mr. Lang’s playing was infectious. The performance drew enthusiastic applause, though not the automatic standing ovation Mr. Lang is used to when he plays a crowd-pleasing Romantic staple. That may come on Tuesday when he performs Liszt’s First Piano Concerto in a special Philharmonic program celebrating the Chinese New Year.
It was an astute idea on Mr. Gilbert’s part to precede the Bartok with Magnus Lindberg’s “Feria,” a 17-minute orchestral essay completed in 1997. The piece begins with highly charged, piercingly modern riffs driven by jagged brass fanfares. In a calmer middle section there are references to Monteverdi below the busy surface that emerge like out-of-focus anthems in the brass. Things pick up again, and the music speeds along, this time in big, heaving swings of orchestral sonorities so bright that you almost want to squint. The performance under Mr. Gilbert was dynamic and colorful. Mr. Lindberg is in the last of his three seasons as the Philharmonic’s composer in residence.
After intermission came Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. And in the context of this adventurous program, that familiar 1944 Neo-Classical piece sounded newly fresh and daring. That impression was boosted by Mr. Gilbert’s approach, which probed the music for depth and weight and drew sonorous, powerful playing from the Philharmonic. The finale, which can come across like a satirical, slapstick romp, was played here with such drive and bite that it seemed dangerous.
- 105 reads
