Lang Lang (pianist)
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For the Australian town, see Lang Lang, Victoria.
Lang Lang (郎朗, pinyin: Láng Lǎng) (born June 14, 1982) is a pianist from Shenyang, China.
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[edit] Childhood
Lang Lang was two years old when he saw Tom playing piano in a Tom and Jerry cartoon in TV (Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor composed by Franz Liszt). According Lang, this first contact to the western music was his inspiration to learn playing the piano. He began piano lessons at the age of three with Professor Zhu Ya-Fen. At the age of five he won the Shenyang Piano Competition and played his first public recital. He entered Beijing's Central Music Conservatory when he was nine, studying under Professor Zhao Ping-Guo. At the age of 11, he won the first prize and award for outstanding artistic performance at the Fourth International Young Pianists Competition in Germany. In 1995 at 13 years of age, he played the Op. 10 and Op. 25 Chopin Etudes, at Beijing Concert Hall and won first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Young Musicians' Competition in Japan, where he performed the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert broadcast by NHK Television. At 14 he was a featured soloist at the China National Symphony's inaugural concert, broadcast by CCTV and attended by President Jiang Zemin. The following year he began studies with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.
[edit] Performing and recording career
Lang Lang's breakthrough came in 1999, when he was 17, with his dramatic last-minute substitution (introduced by Isaac Stern) for an indisposed André Watts at the Ravinia Festival's "Gala of the Century", in which he played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Christoph Eschenbach). The Chicago Tribune called him the greatest, most exciting keyboard talent encountered in many years. In 2001 he made his sold-out Carnegie Hall debut with Yuri Temirkanov, travelled to Beijing with the Philadelphia Orchestra on a tour celebrating its 100th anniversary, during which he performed to an audience of 8,000 at the Great Hall of the People, and made an acclaimed BBC Proms debut, prompting The Times of London's critic to write: "Lang Lang took a sold-out Royal Albert Hall by storm... This could well be history in the making." In 2003, he returned to the BBC Proms for the First Night concert with Leonard Slatkin. After his recent recital debut in the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berliner Zeitung wrote: "Lang Lang is a superb musical performer whose artistic touch is always in service of the music."
Lang Lang has performed with many of the major orchestras of the world, including the Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. He has collaborated with conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Yuri Temirkanov, Michael Tilson Thomas, Manfred Honeck and Franz Welser-Möst.
Lang Lang is a Steinway artist who records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon.
On 27 November 2006, he emigrated to Hong Kong under the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme, the first person to do so under the scheme.
His most recent release, Dragon Songs, explores traditional Chinese music arranged for the piano and new compositions by composer Tan Dun.
[edit] Awards
The subject of a best-selling biography in China, Lang Lang has received numerous awards and has been seen by millions of television viewers throughout the world. He has appeared with Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in a performance that was broadcast by Russian National Television. His 2004 performance with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic at the Waldbühne was attended by 23,000 people and was broadcast internationally on TV. In the summer of 2002, he became the first recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, in recognition of his distinguished musical talent.
Besides his music career, he is passionately dedicated to sharing music with young people and was recently recognized for his efforts by the United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF) who appointed him their newest and youngest international Goodwill Ambassador. In this role, Lang Lang will garner support and raise funds for the survival and well-being of under-privileged children all over the world.
