A Newspaper Review of Li and Lang

Thanks to Sharon for sharing this article with me. I really enjoyed reading it.

So now to end the duel once and for all, here it is

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Protege pianists Lang and Li need to cool the duel: Time to extinguish
destructive flames of meaningless competition
Mark Swed
Los Angeles Times
5 April 2006
Vancouver Sun
Copyright (c) 2006 Vancouver Sun

In one corner, Lang Lang. Born in 1982 in Shenyang, China, he has
knocked out Rachmaninoff on countless occasions. Tchaikovsky,
Mendelssohn and Chopin never have a chance once he gets his mitts on
them. Last month in Los Angeles, he gave Bartok a going-over not soon to
be forgotten. Charismatic poet and flashy dancer, Lang Lang's the champ.


In the other corner, the steely challenger, Yundi Li -- who plays here
Friday at the Orpheum. Also born in 1982 and from Chongquing, China.
He's a world-class Chopin and Liszt slayer. He's fast as lightning, and
his aim is deadly.

Each fighter has in his corner bloodthirsty music management. The
record label Deutsche Grammophon is the match sponsor. The stakes are
high, and the gloves are off -- they have to be, the contestants are
pianists. Somebody's bound to get hurt, and I can hardly ....

Hey, wait a minute! It's not supposed to be like this!

The rivalry between two young pianists just out of protege puberty has
gone too far. Nothing good -- unless you think short-term record company
profits are all that matter -- can come from it.

That Lang and Li are adversaries is no secret in the music industry.
Lang is the hottest young pianist around and has been for some time. But
the ambitious Li is doggedly nipping at his heels.

It can seem cheap to bring up such matters in polite classical-music
society, and most musical journalists have tried to be as circumspect as
they can be. It is all too easy to slip into cultural stereotyping, to
wound fragile young egos. Two years ago in the Boston Globe, Richard
Dyer did courteously confront Li with the question and Li just as
courteously skirted it, noting that the pianists had met only recently.
"I think we are friends," he said.

The fact is, whatever these young men feel about each other, a
commercial rivalry is being fuelled by their keepers. San Franciscans
hardly could have been expected not to notice when the pianists played
back-to-back recitals over two nights in 2004. But by then both were
high-profile Deutsche Grammophon artists, so the spirited scene was well
set.

This year the ante was raised substantially with DG's competitive
release of recital discs by Lang and Li that include the same Mozart
sonata -- K. 330 -- and very similar programs. Lang plays Schumann's
Scenes From Childhood, Li takes on Schumann's Carnaval. Lang concludes
with fingers flying through Vladimir Horowitz's arrangement of Liszt's
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Li races through Liszt's Rhapsodie Espagnole.
The main difference in repertory is that Li plays two sparkling
Scarlatti sonatas, whereas Lang tackles the more substantial Chopin
Third Sonata -- but he needs a bonus disc to make all that music fit.
The bigger name, he gets it.

Lang's, it turns out, is his least interesting recording, while Li's is
his finest by some measure. Comparing them, Li, a normally less
compelling (although no less accomplished) player than Lang, might be
closing in on his opponent. But both pianists are at awkward points in
their careers, and frankly we need neither disc.

Let's start with Lang. He is, without doubt, a tremendous talent and an
abused one. His big break came in 2000, when he substituted at the last
minute for Andre Watts in a performance of the Tchaikovsky Piano
Concerto with the Chicago Symphony. The critical response was ecstatic.


He looked younger than his 17 years. He was adorable, and his technique
was beyond belief. Managers wanted a piece of this action. Why wait for
him to undergo the long and uncertain process of growing up and finding
out who he really was as an artist? He wouldn't stay cute forever, after
all.

Before long, Lang began playing up the endearing factor, seeming happy
to do anything for audience approval, grimacing and gyrating, stretching
musical phrases like taffy, or playing so fast his fingers were all a
blur. But now Lang's early champions were repulsed. Growing up fast, he
wasn't quite so cute anymore.

For his next recital album, Memory, which was made in the studio, Lang
has gone in the opposite direction, toning it down too far. The program,
he notes in the booklet, is a personal exploration of the music he grew
up with. But Lang's youth was not that long ago, and he hardly shows
himself ready to be rethinking music that he does, in fact, need to
rethink. Rather a kind of sentimental preciousness creeps in. Tempos
tend to be slow and dreamy, which is particularly toxic in Mozart.

But his tone is pure gold, and his liquid phrasing still approaches
poetry. His flamboyance shows through now and then, as in the
ferociously difficult Horowitz/Liszt arrangement. It is a lot of shallow
fun.

Lang should stop reading his press, this example included, and stop
listening to money men and women and begin relying more on his own
pianistic instincts. Yundi Li, too: He, more than anyone, should stop
reading Lang's press.

Apart from being the same age, growing up in an obscure Chinese town,
recording for the same label and playing a lot of the same Romantic war
horses, Li is nothing like Lang. His big break came a year after Lang's,
when he won first place in the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2000. Two
years later came his first DG recital disc, all Chopin, with the
20-year-old pianist photographed to look younger and androgynous. The
selling of Li had begun.

It's a dry recording. His tone is hard and clear. The precision of
attack is startling, but the music-making is ultimately mechanical. It's
reminiscent of Horowitz without the oddities.

From the start, Li has presented himself as an unusually serious young
man, who would never sink to Lang's grandstanding, while making sure we
noticed that he has the technique to do so if he wanted. A Liszt CD that
followed his Chopin recital was just as flat.

In a clear effort at Langian one-upmanship, Li's latest recital was
recorded live at the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria, the one concert
hall even more glamorous than Carnegie. And some of the playing here is
smashing. The Scarlatti sonatas are scintillating. Li's Mozart is crisp,
quick, transparent. But in Schumann, Li reverts to his earlier type.
Each movement is meant to reveal a distinct pianistic personality, but
with Li they all sound the same. Liszt's Rhapsody Espagnole shows
superhuman meticulousness and speed, but somehow it is not much fun.

It's time to turn the heat down on both pianists and to stop feeding
the destructive flames of their meaningless competition. And their own
label might be doing just that, though no doubt inadvertently.

Colour Photo: Chinese pianist Yundi Li performs at the Orpheum on
Friday.; Colour Photo: Photo courtesy Deutsche Grammophon / Lang's big
break came in 2000, when he substituted at the last minute in a
performance with the Chicago Symphony. He looked younger than his 17
years. He was adorable, and his technique was beyond belief.; Colour
Photo: Photo courtesy Deutsche Grammophon / Li has presented himself as
an unusually serious young man, who would never sink to Lang's
grandstanding, while making sure we noticed that he has the technique to
do so if he wanted.

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