Racing Chopin All the Way to the Wire

LUCERNE, Switzerland — The other night Lang Lang twittered his way through Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto. How better to describe it? He played with the Dresden Staatskapelle under Fabio Luisi at the KKL concert hall here. I can’t recall a more galling soloist.

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In Lucerne, the Chinese virtuoso Lang Lang performed a Chopin concerto with the Dresden Staatskapelle, led by Fabio Luisi.

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Lang Lang, the 27-year-old Chinese virtuoso, is by various measures the most popular pianist around, a kinetic superstar thanks to his outsize charm and gymnastic technique that earns him the nickname Bang Bang. He can play with grace too. He didn’t here.

He splits opinion. Contemporary culture in general is polarized, but the poles keep shifting in ways that can help tell us where we are. By way of illustration, the night before Mr. Lang made mincemeat of the Chopin concerto, a sizeable, rapt crowd listened in the same hall to Pierre Boulez conducting works by Janacek, Varèse and Berg.

Mr. Boulez is about as serious a musician as there is, and every year he oversees the Lucerne Festival academy that brings young musicians together for several weeks to perform contemporary music. Six gifted percussionists rehearsed Mr. Boulez’s “Répons,” a long, pioneering work of fierce complexity and brilliance, involving live performers mixed with electronics.

That evening Mr. Boulez conducted the academy’s chamber orchestra in “Déserts” by Varèse, a marvelous, prickly, evocative work rewarding a dedicated listener’s full patience, followed by the almost mathematically complex “Kammerkonzert” for piano, violin and 13 winds, by Berg, with Yefim Bronfman and Hae-Sun Kang as the soloists.

Afterward the crowd repeatedly called the players back to the stage for enthusiastic ovations, more sustained than those Mr. Lang would receive the next night.

There have been Lang Langs for as long as there have been keyboard players. Showmen in different eras touch different chords for different generations. This is the age of instant messaging, sound bites, of atomized culture, with information packaged for our convenience in morsels, and Mr. Lang is embraced for more than his winning smile and playing very, very fast.

The way he took apart Chopin’s score made it into a jumble of hyped-up anecdotes. Here he played super quietly, there super slowly, there like Wile E. Coyote in his Acme rocket shoes. Occasionally he came to a near standstill, forcing the orchestra to crawl with him, so he could ravish a rubato. He swooned and swayed as if possessed by the music (feeling the music “at you,” to borrow the New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross’s phrase), as if the audience needed little parcels of exaggerated emotion and virtuosity to stay interested.

It brought to mind what Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about interpreting history these days. Writing for The New Republic, she reviewed a book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke,” about the lead-up to World War II, which stitched together, without comment, hundreds of nuggets culled from newspapers, memoirs and other (often secondary) sources to suggest a case for pacifism.

“A series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes,” Ms. Applebaum called these orchestrated tidbits. “Ripped from their respective contexts each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote.”

That’s not a bad description of what Mr. Lang did with the Chopin concerto. What Ms. Applebaum added is also true about music: “There are many legitimate ways to write history, even many avant-garde, nonlinear, novelistic ways to write history, as the historiography of World War II itself well illustrates.” But history persuasively told, like music interpreted, comes down to cogent arguments. The pianist Glenn Gould was an eccentric interpreter, but his interpretations, whether you liked them or not, had their own internal, neurotic logic. They made an elaborate case for themselves. The same could be said about playing by Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter.

Flashy passages strung together don’t make an argument. They make an assortment of fetishes. “Perhaps,” Ms. Applebaum wondered at one point about “Human Smoke,” “the whole book is a gigantic practical joke, a stunt intended to provoke.” I wondered the same thing during the concerto.

I decided it was a stunt. But it wasn’t a joke. Whatever else he may be, Mr. Lang is sincere. He has peddled his sincerity all the way to the bank.

That and his virtuosity, so his fans say, have made him classical music’s latest matinee idol.