Do or Die: Lang Lang's Story imagine...

Both of my parents had their musical dream.

Somehow they achieved a little bit but not much and they basically

give hope that their son

will finish their childhood musical dreams.

For me there is always my parents, or just my father or just my mother.

They are a big part of my career and life.

APPLAUSE

CLASSICAL PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

No matter how good a technique you have,

if you have no emotion, you are just a machine.

And the world doesn't need another machine pianist,

we need a real human being to have the mind, the heart,

the guts - they all need to be together.

Every time you look into a score, you learn new things.

Also, I am trying to get the mood... Set the mood right, you know?

To get this concentration, to get everything, you know, ready.

That's the good thing about music,

there is always a new way of presenting it.

To bring it into a different dimension.

If you always think about the same way of interpreting music,

you're out.

I don't want to be just a pianist,

I want to be someone who can influence the next generation.

This is Lang Lang, aged five - the apple of his parents' eye.

I think to develop really extraordinary musical ability

at a really early age

requires a certain amount of parental pressure.

And sometimes that parental pressure works out beautifully,

and sometimes it turns into a disaster.

Lang Lang is a real example of brilliance honed by punishment.

His father fostered a kind of almost lunatic competitiveness.

I don't know how he survived, he obviously has done.

And to be such a joyous performer, and a very joyous person, I think.

He has immense personal unaffected charm.

A lot of other people would not have survived.

CLASSICAL MUSIC BEGINS

He has an extraordinary facility,

a very unusual sensitivity of how he reacts to

harmony changes, to mood changes.

Lang Lang has become a worldwide phenomenon,

playing sell-out concerts whenever he goes.

But his expressive style draws criticism too.

He is seeing things through modern eyes,

so his approach to playing is possibly different from the norm.

Performers in the past got outrageous reviews for what they did,

because they were different.

Partly the critics think it's ego from Lang Lang.

What they miss, perhaps, is his genuine personality underneath that.

He's able to bring music to the masses, and that is a real gift.

APPLAUSE

I am actually used to this kind of speed, I kind of enjoy it.

It is a life that everyone dreams to have as artists.

But, certainly, it's not very normal.

There is a big split, isn't there, between people who have money

and are beginning to do well, and people who still don't?

It is a much bigger split than before during the '80s, but obviously

in China, the whole generation only has one kid, so you have your parents

and you have your grandparents from different sides and they...

They are all concentrated on you.

So, in a way, even if you're not in a good position money-wise,

you still get a lot of attention.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

People are very suspicious of outward glamour. People think,

"Oh, this is out of control, this is too much."

The green-eyed monster of jealousy plays its part.

When Liszt was alive, Liszt was the ultimate showman,

possibly the greatest pianist who has ever lived,

hugely flamboyant, and, oh, people hated it!

He is, in a way, unbelievably famous

in the West as the Chinese pianist,

and he is unbelievably famous in China as the pianist

who is able to transcend his Chineseness

and become an international classical music star.

He has been very canny in playing the cultures against one another.

Lang Lang grew up in the industrial city of Shenyang in North East China

where his father was a factory worker.

But he harboured a secret ambition.

During these short breaks,

Lang Lang was allowed to watch cartoons

on a small black-and-white television.

The Cat Concerto from the Tom and Jerry cartoon,

I can still feel that, almost like yesterday.

Tom was dressed up in a tuxedo with tails and with a white tie,

and for a Chinese at that time,

we didn't normally wear that kind of stuff.

And then he starts playing...

And then he wakes up the little mouse, Jerry.

They start fighting with...

..getting faster and faster...

..and then the way the cartoon made his hands almost like Italian spaghetti.

And I'm like, "Wow, being a pianist is cool!"

I thought it was a lot of fun.

You have the white keys and the black Keys, it's almost like a game,

but then I realised it is not a game,

it is not a practice.

Did you, from the very beginning, you were a tough taskmaster?

I don't listen to him, he gets really mad.

He said some really serious stuff.

I got a real bad time with him sometimes.

He made me cry and he tried to scare me

if I don't do the right things, so yeah.

Whatever natural flair or talent you have, you have to hone it.

It's a craft and I think the brilliance at the beginning

as you go on has to become more and more something you work at.

The bigger the talent, the harder you discipline it and hone it

all the time into something that has a huge foundation behind it.

A teacher has a huge responsibility.

His father found out

that I was the best teacher in Shenyang at the time

and he wanted me to teach him

so he brought him to my house.

The first impressions were of such a brilliant kid.

He had a very strong will, a determination at such an early age.

He said he would practise hard,

he was willing to do anything in order to be a good pianist.

His father always came with Lang Lang.

When I taught Lang Lang anything, he was studying at the same time.

Very, very intelligent person.

So he was helping Lang Lang musically a lot.

He loves his mother.

He has very strong emotions especially for his mother.

His father is someone that, although he was afraid of him,

but he needs him also.

I think his relation to his father is love and hate.

Love and hate!

But also later on he understood that his father helped him a lot

on the other end.

In China now, everybody wants a little bit of the Lang Lang effect.

You can see little children as small as five who are absolutely

enthralled by watching him.

There aren't many children that would normally go to

a classical piano recital and sit quietly and listen.

But they are, he communicates to children.

So I think he's inspired them.

The piano is increasingly popular in China.

There are said to be 40-50 million children learning to play

and a growing demand for more instruments.

This factory in Guangzhou, one of the biggest in the world,

makes over 120,000 a year.

Some attribute this interest to Lang Lang's

influence on a generation of Chinese children.

The piano has become the focus, not just for musical achievement,

but for the prestige,

wealth and success that a childhood studying music can bring.

Now Lang Lang has opened his own music school in Shenzhen

in south China, one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

BOY PLAYS PIANO

LANG LANG GIVES DIRECTION

Education, you really need to really spend time and make efforts.

I don't have a lot of personal time, but I think it's worth it

because I think I can influence other people.

I really enjoy doing it.

The school officially started right after the Chinese dragon year,

so it's a good year.

Actually this year I'm turning 30

so it's kind of a new milestone for my life as well.

You need to put everything into the hands, getting deeper but not loud.

Not loud, intimate. Try it one more time.

Let me make sure you... Hold on, hold on. Rise note.

You need to be off here. Off.

Off.

Yeah. Yes.

It's too loud, too loud.

'Really wonderful playing already.

'I feel the way he plays, very serious, like a little gentleman.'

Yes, that's right.

You need to be more careful.

Right, it's a little bit like a cat, OK. The cat's walk.

Nice. Bom, bom, bom. Changing colours.

Da da da! Yes. Yeah.

OK, hold on. Your left hand needs to be precise. From soft, yes.

LANG LANG HUMS ALONG

Lonely again.

They need to connect, no matter what piece they are playing,

whether it's hard or simple.

They need to bring a whole planet into their interpretations.

How they react, the chemistry from music,

the chemistry from the harmonies.

For us, the important thing is not only the students get it,

but teachers get it.

First challenge for us it to train the teachers.

Today, we have a new audition.

HE PLAYS A SOMBRE TUNE

With students, I intend to be a little bit softer.

But with teachers, come on, we are all taught.

She's not upset, she's not very happy about herself.

I'm just saying, please play the scales and I like to know.

When she didn't do well, she knows it and then

she feels a little bit weird, so she started to cry a little bit.

But I think it's absolutely normal, you know.

When I am not doing well, I will cry too.

We need to be critical to ourself. You can't just let it go.

Of course, bringing the passion and love to music is necessary,

but they also need to find a really nice method to show

one step at a time how to be a chief on the keys.

THEY PLAY A FANFARE

The 1960s was a period of political upheaval in China.

The Cultural Revolution was Chairman Mao's attempt to create

a classless society through a series of radical reforms.

Anyone suspected of spreading Western influence

or promoting capitalism was persecuted.

During the Cultural Revolution, according to Mao,

every young person has to be accepted, re-education,

sent to the countryside apart from family,

plant the rice.

I was there too.

I went to the countryside working like a farmer.

Anything from the West was something bad.

I think I stopped playing piano for eight years.

One day, we suddenly hear all the speakers turned on.

We don't know why this funeral music started. And it says, "Mao died."

As soon as I heard Mao died,

I went back, packed my belongings.

I said, "I'm going home now!"

Lang Lang's father and mother, they loved music.

They themselves wanted to be good musicians

but they didn't have the chance to

but then, they put all their hope on their child.

After the Cultural Revolution,

when China's door getting opened up again gradually,

the piano became the first instrument.

Even during my time, when you're in piano competitions,

there are like, thousands of applicants,

you know, in a small town, not big towns, thousands of kids.

Professor Zhu, from the very beginning,

gave me every week a new Bach work

and I am to memorise it for the next week.

For such a kid so talented like Lang Lang,

he should expose himself to a wider music world,

and Shenyang is a local place, it's provincial.

Culturally, it's not a good place

so we decided that he should go to Beijing.

We have only nine conservatories in the whole country.

In order to get into that level

before going for the examination,

they have to stop two years

just to stay home and practise eight to ten hours every day.

Mum actually told me that she is leaving tomorrow to go home

and I said, "Take me." She said, "No, no, you're staying here.

"I'm going back." Then I realise

my life will be changed forever.

The reality has become quite cruel.

At that moment, I felt kind of lost.

We were actually living in the slum area,

so I didn't like Beijing so much.

Beijing people like to have a long evening having fun.

So they can't get up in the morning at 5:30,

so gradually, they fall asleep and we already start playing.

Kind of boring stuff, you know, the scales.

And then the chords

and then the octave scales.

It just, I think, drove them nuts.

GLASS BREAKS

With only a few months to go

before Lang Lang would sit the entrance exam

for the Beijing Conservatory,

a new teacher was urgently needed.

I knew something was wrong the first time when I went to her apartment.

It was in a very dark hallway.

HE KNOCKS

And you see this tiny woman came out.

"What do you have?" I start playing.

"What else do you play?

"Wrong! Bad! No talent!"

"Horrible!" Then, "You shouldn't play piano any more."

"You will never get into the Conservatory.

"You will never become a pianist. Go home, do something else."

She fired me, so...

HE PLAYS BACH'S PARTITA NO. 1

On that day, the nine-year-old Lang Lang

vowed that he would never play the piano again.

I have been moved by Lang Lang's performances

because I've heard a joyous quality

and that is very heartening.

It's wonderful to hear people with this utter delight in performing.

He's a born performer. He loves being out there.

It's almost easy for him to play the piano.

In a sense, playing the piano itself

doesn't mean anything. What means something

is what you make of the music and what your insights are

and how you really explore that music.

The good thing about Lang Lang is he's always exploring,

he's always playing music he hasn't played before

and I think that's part of every artist's growth.

Nobody should be playing in their comfort zone.

In a curious way, I sometimes think that his triumphs as a musician

are partly a matter of winning a competition with his father,

of his father having always said,

"You're never really going to measure up to this,"

and he finally said, "You know what?

"I can actually do it better than even you had in mind.

"You just wait and see."

Enraged by the encounter with his father,

Lang Lang hadn't played the piano for months.

One day, dejected and alone, he wandered into the local food market.

'Tapping the surface of a watermelon to see if it was ripe,

'Lang Lang caught the attention of the storeholder,

'a man whose friendship would change Lang Lang's life.'

I say yeah, I was a retired pianist and they were, "How old are you?"

I say, "Nine-and-a-half," "You're retired?! Are you crazy?"

The man who became a lifelong friend

was duly named Uncle Number Two.

Uncle Number Two actually cooked for us

and he made a lot of good, fresh meat from the market.

I didn't want to talk to my father

so he's the one, I talked to him, he talked to my father

and then my father talked to him and he talked to me!

Uncle Number Two was the peacemaker who reconciled father and son,

but nine-year-old Lang Lang was still not playing the piano.

But in due course, after weeks of defiance,

Lang Lang finally submitted.

Uncle Number Two brought the family together just in time.

Soon after, Lang Lang took his entrance exam

for the Conservatory of Music.

INSTRUCTIONS CALLED IN CHINESE

MUSIC PLAYS

After months of anguish and years of practice,

Lang Lang was finally enrolled

as the number one student in China's most prestigious music school.

But even number one at the Beijing Conservatory

was not good enough for his father.

Lang Lang now had to prove himself on a world stage.

Lang Guoren entered him for an international competition in Germany

and to increase his chances of success,

they brought with them a new teacher, Professor Zhao.

HE SPEAKS IN CHINESE

Pianists who were studying at the Conservatory

were to be chosen to represent China at the competition

and Lang Lang was not chosen.

It was possible to enter the competition privately.

It was unbelievably expensive, so that it required enormous sacrifice.

If you do all of that and then you fail,

you really look like an idiot,

so they went off to Germany,

Lang Lang worked and he worked in his unbelievable tireless way.

His father coached him through it,

talked about the other competitors, did a kind of strategy

almost as if it were a football game, figuring out

if this one does this you do that and if that one does this,

setting the whole thing up, I mean really experiencing it

in the most, kind of, sporting, competitive terms.

APPLAUSE

Becoming a pianist, it entails so many different factors.

It's an art,

but it's also a sport.

It has sport element,

physically fit, physically pliable,

fast.

If a youngster is properly nurtured,

it is when that youngster has learned to walk the path,

to become the journeyman in search of truth.

When that happens, then that's success.

First prize with special prize

for outstanding artistic achievement...

Lang Lang.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Afterwards, someone said to Lang Lang,

"You know, when you won, your father was in tears."

And Lang Lang said, "My father is incapable of tears."

APPLAUSE

But it was still not enough for Lang Guoren.

Following his triumph in Germany, Lang Lang entered

the Tchaikovsky competition in Japan,

perhaps the most prestigious of all piano competitions.

This would be Lang Lang's greatest challenge yet and required him

to play with an orchestra for the very first time.

I prepared quite well.

I was watching video and so television is here, right,

so my piano is there, so I kind of learned from the video

and actually played like karaoke.

That's the way I learned how to play concertos.

Really missed my mom so much at times.

Very painful when I think about it because it's helpless,

exactly like the music.

Chopin wrote it for his first love and I kind of...

my father and also my teachers, you know...

"OK, just think about how longing you are for your mother."

So then I start feeling it

and I played the second movement really beautifully, but not

thinking about some girl I love, not like that,

just loving for my mum.

THEY CHATTER

Extremely exciting, I mean, this is the Queen's Jubilee, I mean,

this is such a great honour to be performing

for her and many people tonight around the world.

Little bit, mainly...

It's a human quality he has that a lot of prodigies lose their

social ability to interact because they're locked away in a room

all the time, they're under that really harsh regime.

So you've got to have a very strong personality to come through that

with the capabilities to be a concert pianist

and still retain your personality.

Hi, Lang Lang.

-You're going to do something with the two cellos for us.

-Right!

-Thank you very much. It's great to meet you.

-Such a pleasure.

-Same to me, yeah. Fantastic. Have a photograph?

-Yes, please.

He's very excited by the Royals,

because it's something that China doesn't really have.

And to be part of the Jubilee concert for him, especially amongst

all the royalty of British rock and pop - he got a real kick from that.

-Nice shoes!

-Thanks.

-And brooch.

THEY CHATTER

-The kitchen made pretty good Chinese food for me.

-They did.

-Very good.

One of the biggest problems

with classical music at the moment is there's an old guard still alive

and still active

in critique of classical music and he is everything they hate.

He's popular, he has his own power that allows him

to make his own decisions but they also recognise he is

everything they need. Every concert seems to be a growth in audience

size, every CD sells more than the last one in a declining market.

You know, that's proof in itself that he's got something.

Here we go! Queen's Jubilee begins. Yeah!

MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin

BELLS CHIME IN DISTANCE

-You forget how beautiful the buildings are by studying here.

-Oh, right.

Every day you walk through the streets and go,

"There's the...library, or..."

Basically, Lang Lang's personal relationships are his parents.

He has occasional girlfriends and, you know, they tend to be people

that aren't in the music business because this is what

he yearns, more than anything, is to have a little bit of normality.

He'll never have a normal life, he knows that,

but he loves doing the mundane

because he's still coming to terms with the fact that there

might be more to life than just playing the piano.

We're putting on a classical experimental night

in a nightclub, DJ classical music.

DJ versus classical, yeah? That's cool.

How long are you going to be in Oxford for?

Today and then I come back the day after tomorrow for a concert.

People often ask me about the influences in my life.

My father was relentless in pushing me to practice harder every day,

Professor Zhu emphasised the importance of recreation, rest and play.

At the age of five I won the first prize

but I still remember that night before the competition.

I got overexcited

and I went to the bathroom and toilet ten times!

I think it's a great shame that he's not come in contact with

a lot of other subjects -

literature, philosophy or painting.

He's sort of had to catch up, that sort of scratching the surface

and he's very curious so he's made quite amazing efforts.

On the nature versus nurture debate,

how much do you feel that

talent, such as your musical talent,

is something that you are born with or something that you can develop?

We are in Oxford now!

Some people have better technique, born with better technique,

so you can't...but one thing is important.

It doesn't mean that you can work less and get a better result.

One thing I believe and this is from Lao Tzu, the great philosopher -

our life is building from single steps.

One step followed another one and another one and another

and you can't skip those steps.

Age 13, the next step for Lang Lang would be to further

his musical education abroad.

Father and son come to America to compete for a place

at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

It's here that he'll meet a key influence in his life,

the pianist and teacher Gary Graffman, who had himself

been a child prodigy and a celebrated concert pianist.

When we have auditions you can tell, literally in ten seconds,

30 seconds, if somebody is very talented or somebody's not talented

at all, so it was very clear this was a major talent.

He did arrive, I must say, at Curtis, from what

I remember, with his father and several suitcases,

as if he had planned to stay for a while!

He knows how to become a professional performer, not just a pianist

but to have a career, you know, it's a slightly different story.

So he knows how to do it and he knows which steps I shall do it.

APPLAUSE

Gary Graffman had once been a student of Vladimir Horowitz,

one of the great concert pianists of all time.

I still remember Horowitz, you know...

and the way he...and the sound.

And I saw, you know, in the audience people were crying and that

and I was, "Wow, this is magical, powerful."

To see a great-grandfather to play something for your entire life and

to get better and better and better, I thought this is a good way to live.

Horowitz made me think of the human voice all the time.

Play this the way one would sing it.

I can imagine where I would have to breathe.

And why there? No, no.

Maybe I'll hold it and breathe in a different place.

That makes a huge difference.

The incredible sound of Horowitz

derives from his right hand sound. His singing sound.

Darkness and much light also.

Horowitz had something almost, ALMOST diabolic.

He had a blazing technique that people literally couldn't understand.

It was so brilliant it just knocked people flat,

he could do things on the piano which were not humanly explicable.

I am very happy to have worked with him.

In my opinion, he would have flourished anywhere.

He learned very quickly and he was with me, I guess, five years.

His father sat in on most of these lessons, or almost all of them,

and took notes.

A competition is a way to further your career.

From my point of view, it wasn't important at all.

From his point, or maybe his father's,

it was very important because of the whole background

where you have to be number one,

you have to always, whatever you're doing, win.

Somebody else is number two, you are number one.

I don't know that the father agreed with me, but I insisted on it.

Why enter a competition where if you win,

you play with a certain orchestra

when the conductor of that orchestra,

just by hearing you, is going to engage you.

What I did was invite people from New York to come and hear him.

From the first note on I was fascinated about...

I mean, the touch of the first note was special.

I felt deeply moved that a 17-year-old gets so deep inside

into the centre of the music, and what music wants to say.

Five days later, I invited him to play the Tchaikovsky concerto

for the millennium gala of the Ravinia Festival.

That was his breakthrough.

That was the concert that changed my life. Yeah.

San Francisco Symphony booked me right away.

The Detroit Symphony, right away.

Philadelphia. Cleveland.

New York Philharmonic.

And in 2003, Carnegie Hall in New York,

the most celebrated of all concert venues,

for a classical piano recital.

HE TESTS PIANO

From day one, it's had this magnetism

and every artist has wanted to perform there.

I often go backstage after a concert

and somebody who's making their debut will just be in tears

because they have waited all their life to perform there.

So when they stepped out onto that platform, they were more scared

and more keyed up than anywhere else they had played in the world.

There is a special thing about it.

It's the spirits which fly around, you know,

of all the people who have played there.

HE PLAYS PIANO

I mean, put very literally, the world does not need pianists,

it needs accountants, it needs lawyers, it needs doctors.

So there is room for very few.

And thousands of people are filled with the desperation

and ambition to do this and bring it off.

And you need enormous talent, enormous skill,

colossal determination and a hell of a lot of luck too.

Good evening!

This is my father.

CROWD APPLAUD

When you were at Carnegie Hall, finally you got the recognition

that you wanted in America, that your father wanted,

he comes and plays with you on stage.

Because my father basically shared his life with my career.

Because he was training to become a musician as well,

and I thought this was a really nice idea.

At the same time that I'm achieving my dream,

he's achieving his dream as well.

I thought it was a beautiful moment in our lives.

MUSIC: "Horse" Traditional Chinese Song

CROWD APPLAUD

That love that your father and your mother both have for you,

it's a different kind of love.

Your mother's love is a kind of love which wants to see you happy.

Right, exactly.

What do you feel now, in retrospect,

about your father's determination for you to win?

My father is very...very pushy.

You know, he's still quite a pushy person,

he's just not very relaxed, he's, in a way, quite aggressive.

With me, there's always distance and he realises. I mean, he knows that.

Maybe I want to get closer to him, but I'm a little bit afraid.

You know, so I'm always also a little bit of...

A bit distant to him as well.

I mean, my father and my mum, they are totally different personalities.

They always have the biggest different opinion in life.

And there is always arguments.

And my mum totally believes in her,

and my father totally believes in him.

So they never compromise with each other.

But on my career they made a...you know,

they find there are some common things,

which is they all want to support me.

But in life, it's a different story.

SONG: "Horse" Traditional Chinese Song

THEY LAUGH

APPLAUSE

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

In Berlin, last-minute preparations are underway

for a very special concert, hosted by Telefonica at the O2 Arena.

CHEERING

# Happy birthday to you

# Happy birthday dear Lang Lang

# Happy birthday to you! #

CHEERING

30 is so significant to him.

He feels like it's a turning point, he's grown up.

He's been totally looking forward to this moment,

and that's why I think the foundation this last year has been so important for him.

My foundation was established in 2008.

I believe that music will change people.

Lang Lang's foundation offers financial support

to young, aspiring pianists, providing them with opportunities

to perform in some of the biggest concert halls in the world.

Hi, everyone!

ALL: Hello.

Welcome to Berlin!

I'm just so happy to play with you. You make me feel very old today.

THEY PLAY PIANO

He's talked about nurturing talent for a long time,

it's only with the onset of his 30th birthday that he seems to feel

everything in his life has to be readdressed.

More than anything, he seems to be moving towards the idea that

he now knows enough and has the confidence in knowing enough to give back.

OK, stop.

Don't rush!

Don't rush, OK? Don't rush.

And it's important.

We have forte, we have a piano, we have legatos, we have fortissimos!

We have big diminuendos. We need to play those things.

OK?

We can't just play everything the same.

We need to have dynamics.

So now let's begin from the very beginning.

PIANO PLAYS

'They need to learn how to watch the conductor and how to play,

'and how to make music as a team.

'When to use emotion and when to not use it,

'and in order to have the climax and build-ups.'

PIANO CONTINUES

Whoa! It is very difficult.

What's been interesting to see in more recent years is

that as Lang Lang's success really has arrived pretty much

at the level that Lang Guoren had once imagined,

Lang Lang now is the one who has, in some ways, the upper hand,

and Lang Guoren is the one who's there,

helping him to pack his suitcases and helping to take care of him

and to deal with various practicalities in his life,

and I think there must be something very satisfying, in fact,

to both of them,

about having arrived at the point of that reversal.

The essence of all my conversation with Lang Lang came

when I said to him, "By many Western standards,

"the way that your father treated you would constitute abuse."

"Do you feel like you were an abused child?"

And he said,

"If my father had treated me that way

"and I had not made it as a musician,

"I would probably have a terrible, ruined life,

"but since the pressure my father applied allowed me to become

"an international superstar, something I very much enjoy being,

"I would say it was a wonderful way to grow up."

ANNOUNCER: 'Also, drei Attribute, die genau auf Lang Lang passen.'

MUSIC: "Hungarian Dance No. 5" by Johannes Brahms

Latitude music festival in Suffolk.

But today, this crowd of thousands

have something unusual in store for them.

You've definitely decided on what you're playing?

It's getting dark.

I was always ready.

It's my last concert of the season, so I'm quite happy.

Finito!

It's a pleasure, thank you!

The reason he's doing Latitude is that we were

looking for a platform for him to go and play to a wider public.

The idea of getting an intelligent music audience in one place

and putting him in front of them

and seeing how they react was too much to pass over.

Obviously, Lang Lang lives his life in a stuffy,

classical environment of the Carnegie Hall,

of the Royal Albert Hall, and I love those places,

I absolutely love them,

but they bring a familiarity, and they bring a comfort factor.

Of course, he's on record about wanting people to play

the piano more, enrich their lives with classical music,

and lots of people are on record as saying exactly the same things,

but none of them do it.

Thank you, everyone!

It's a great pleasure to be in Latitude.

He's playing Chopin and Liszt.

He's not going up there and playing Jay-Z or Radiohead, even, you know.

He's going up there and playing core repertoire,

and the audience reaction, if they react in the way that we think they

might do, that will justify probably everything he's done up to now.

LANG LANG PLAYS PIANO

We need more people who step outside the institutional

classical world, that obviously has fantastic performers in

and is supporting classical music brilliantly, but it's just

great when someone does just step out of the traditional framework.

Unless you were brought up listening to classical music,

often you'll just never really get a chance to hear it except,

you know, in the background of movies or in adverts or

something, and suddenly someone like Lang Lang does bring

classical music to more people, so that's excellent.

I would like to play the Dedication by Schumann,

and transcript by Liszt.

And I would like to dedicate this piece to all of you.

Thank you for being here today. Thank you.

MUSIC: "Dedication" by Robert Schumann

You should be carried into another world

when you go to hear a great pianist, but when I say another world,

not an escapist's one.

A real world.

When Debussy said once,

"The imaginative life is the only real life,"

I believe that very strongly.

You're carried into a world where a lot of trivialities and pettiness

and ill-feeling can be resolved.

Music is so much more than some sort of escapist activity.

His persona is one of exuberance and charm and he's delightful

and he's fun. Then when he plays the music,

the thing that he does best is to convey pain and loss and sorrow.

He conveys a kind of anguish.

Those early traumas, they're in the music,

and I think it may be too early to know how they play out in his life.

I think the mere fact that a certain number of people

sit down to hear the same piece of music

that's been played at that moment,

you experience a whole lifetime.

And an artist who has the talent, the capacity and the intelligence

to convey that,

and make this collective group of people feel that,

has done something very important, and this is the power of music.

Music starts from nothing, and ends in nothing, just as we start

from nothing and end in nothing, and this is what is important.

APPLAUSE

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