Lang Lang pegs back a notch on the rockstar glamour

When piano superstar Lang Lang was here three years ago it was like a rock concert with adoring fans screaming and security guards prowling the front of the stage. This time it was different.

Lang Lang performed two gala concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Picture: Brian Ach/Getty Images for Hublot

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The flamboyant Chinese virtuoso — here for two performances with Sydney Symphony Orchestra — was dressed in a conservative black suit, didn’t throw his sweat-stained handkerchief into the stalls like before and exuded star quality of a far more restrained kind.

True there were still the extravagant hand gestures and studied poses as he sat before the Steinway, as well as the adoring fans in the choir stalls whom he acknowledged with a wave, but this was more about the music than the man and his performance of Mozart’s Piano concert No. 24 was scintillating.

Chief conductor David Robertson made sure that this was a fully integrated performance. One of the most dramatic of Mozart’s 27 concertos, the C minor work is not a virtuosic showpiece but is more like an operatic duet between piano and orchestra, and soloist and conductor kept it that way.

Lang Lang’s seemingly effortless technique and ability to communicate the beauty and “inner voices” of the music are what people come to see and they weren’t disappointed. In the circle behind the boxes it was standing room only, and after the performance the rest of the audience joined them by rising to their feet for a standing ovation.

Four curtain calls later and Lang Lang dazzled with two short encores, Mendelssohn’s Spinning Song and a madcap whirling extract from Carl Czerny’s The School of Velocity.

Normally the soloist performs in the first half of a concert but shrewd promoters know that you keep a star of this quality to the end, otherwise there would be a mass halftime exodus.

FRAGMENTS

For this concert Robertson paired Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony with a reconstruction of another work that the composer never completed and which only came to light in 1978 — three movements of what would have been his 10th symphony sketched out in piano form during the last weeks of his life.

The Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio took these fragments, orchestrated them and then filled in the gaps with “concrete” — music that drew on Schubert’s late works which might have been going through the composer’s head at the time. These imagine sections are accompanied by the celesta.

The result, called Rendering, is more than half an hour long and is probably better enjoyed in its recorded form than as a concert piece. It does contain some beautiful music, especially Schubert’s andante which foreshadows Mahler.

The SSO under Robertson were in marvellous form for the ever-popular Unfinished Symphony which started the second half and heralded the arrival of the Chinese megastar.

The concert is repeated at Sydney Opera House Concert Hall at 8pm on Saturday, June 29, but you will be lucky if you can even get standing room. Worth a try.

DETAILS

● CONCERT Lang Lang with Sydney Symphony Orchestra

● WHERE Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

● WHEN Thursday, June 27