Think what you will of Lang Lang’s brand of pianist-celebrity, but his technical control is absolute. The right-hand melody of Fauré’s Pavane was so smooth it might have been glued together. Descant lines tinkled like a tiny music box. His left hand was heavyweight throughout, as if he had decided to turn up the bass.
Such oddity was nothing compared to his take on Schumann’s Kreisleriana – a set of eight self-consciously eccentric miniatures. Lang Lang launched himself on to the keyboard for the first, driving hard and loud, his hands flying theatrically at the end. For contrast: more of that hushed music-box tone and passages of precious, gossamer delicacy before instantaneous switches back into muscular rollicking dissonance. A more-is-more approach to the sustaining pedal turned some moments into spectacular slush. Just occasionally, there was a magical, quiet sense of storytelling and the penultimate movement was suddenly, playfully dry (pedal briefly abandoned) until yet another gear change into a passage smashed out so quickly it blurred. In the final movement Lang’s ever-dominant left hand treated Schumann like Rachmaninov.
