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Past and future
Lang Lang, Swan Lake, French night at the BSO, and Eugene Onegin
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Back in 2003, in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" column, Earl Wild was quoted as calling Lang Lang "the J. Lo of pianists." Wild didn’t mean it as a compliment (he also complained about the "Brendelization" of piano playing and bitched that Martha Argerich "can’t play eight bars in the same tempo"), but it made you wonder what he did mean. All celebrity and no chops? All attitude and no artistry? Would Hilary Swank have been a more flattering comparison? Is being J. Lo such a bad thing?

At his Bank of America Celebrity Series recital at Symphony Hall a week ago Wednesday, Lang Lang was nothing if not chops. He tore into the Horowitz transcription of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 with a ferocity that lifted him off the piano bench; the notes didn’t blur even when his fingers did, and no matter how fast he played, his bell-like sonority never turned fuzzy or ugly. His technique didn’t just beggar belief, it beggared the imagination.

But Lang Lang doesn’t so much play music as he plays the piano. (People said the same about Horowitz, though not always.) Here a Vesuvial eruption, there a gossamer whisper, further on a pounded-out bass line that we surely never noticed before. The opening Mozart sonata, K.330 in C, was atypically constipated, with pinging in the right hand and bouncy-banging in the left (at one point he seemed not the J. Lo but the Tigger of pianists) and phrases that bereft of emotion. The outset of Chopin’s luminous B-minor sonata found him tightroping exquisitely, if ostentatiously, between impulse and introspection, but then he became self-absorbed, the movement wandered and lost its arc, and the audience started coughing. The irony is that Lang Lang plays classical music for people who are bored by classical music. He’s geared to minimal attention spans, all present tense, no past or future; yet whenever he shifts from pyrotechnics to pearls, the audience grows restive.

Schumann’s Kinderszenen ("Scenes from Childhood") is really the reflections of an adult on childhood, but for Lang Lang, all precious poetry and precious little perception, it was one big playground, inflation substituting for elasticity, didacticism for dancing. When "Der Dichter spricht," the audience should not, but during this most inward last piece, there was another outbreak of coughing. Harmonically drained Rachmaninov and hair-tossing Liszt gave greater satisfaction, as did the encores: a Chinese melody about moonlight on water: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, phenomenally bee-like; Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3.

The quicksilver beginning of the Chopin sonata’s scherzo had been equally phenomenal, but then he proved clueless as to the harmonic direction of the largo. For Lang Lang, the performance of this music has no history, no Anda or Moravec, no Kapell or Lipatti, no Horowitz or Demus — there’s only the score and the piano. Without a past, can there be a future?

IT WAS AN OVERCAST FRIDAY NIGHT at the Majestic Theatre, Siegfried was in the middle of his act-one-ending solo, and somewhere backstage, a dog was barking. That about summed up the one Boston performance of the Russian National Ballet Theatre of Moscow’s Swan Lake. The strings of the Sofia Symphony Orchestra had only the vaguest notion of intonation; the winds and the brass flubbed notes right, left, and center. Conductor Sergey Kondrashev aggravated the situation with his slow tempi. They made the Boston Ballet Orchestra, which has occasional intonation problems, sound like the Berlin Philharmonic.

The Russian National Ballet Theatre of Moscow was founded in 2001 by Vladimir Moiseev, Evgeny Amosov, and Elvira Wood, who according to the program "hold the same views on choreography." To judge from this offering, they share the view that traditional choreography is altogether too demanding. The Siegfried, Maxim Romanov, had an elegant line but only one facial expression, and double pirouettes as well as double tours en l’air were an adventure. The Odette/Odile, Ekaterina (or Elena, depending on which part of the program you believe) Evseev, was lucid in her Black Swan teasing of Siegfried, and the vulnerability of her Odette was enticing; her artistic line, however, was choppy (fault the orchestra at least in part) and her technique only modest, with no elevation and Black Swan fouettés (29 or 30) that fell behind the beat and took the scenic route. The Fool, Khasan Usmanov, flashed some split tours jetés and a decent series of tours à la seconde, but his affect, abetted by hideous costumes and make-up, was that of a queer guy in need of a straight eye. The swans, flashing lots of long straight leg, impressed with the ensemble of their arm positions.

It all culminated in a final act where Siegfried, whom Odette has been shielding, sneaks up behind Rothbart (Andrey Shalin) and, in a move he surely learned from Vince McMahon, tweaks the bad guy’s owl wing, inducing paralysis and death. Freed, the swans stride boldly forward. Happy ending for everyone but the audience.

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Issue Date: April 8 - 14, 2005
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