Recital Report

I promised I would report on the second recital in the series of five, so here I go. The performer was Lang Lang, as I mentioned, and he had a lot more charisma and a better stage presence than Grigory Sokolov, whom I saw/heard the week before. He is less than half the age, after all! At the beginning of the recital, he came out onto the stage and smiled at the audience and bowed in each direction before he sat down.

As you can see from the picture at right, he can get a little carried away at times. He played pieces by Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Liszt. I was familiar with almost all the music on the program, and could even play some of it! He definitely has his own style of interpretation. I am not quite sure that I liked how he interpreted some of the music, to be honest. But all in all it was a good show.

I went with seven other seminarians, and they all enjoyed the recital. The last piece on the program was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. And let me tell you -- that alone was worth the cost of the ticket! His fingers, hands, and arms were flying all over the place. It was one of those pieces that would take me years to learn, if I ever attempted it. I wish I had a video of him playing it. Wow.


He played four encores in all. The first two were Chinese pieces (which, of course, I had never heard before): Moonlight Reflections, and some kind of "Happy New Year" song for the Year of the Dog. Very interesting. I liked them. Then after that he played Liszt's Liebestraum, and then Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee, a tried-and-true favorite.

These recitals always do me a lot of good because I come home eager to practice and to increase the musicality of my playing. It lasts for at least a little while, anyway!