He is a pianist, philanthropist and educator born in Shenyang, China to a family where his parents were put on rice farms to work during the Cultural Revolution. His father plays the erhu and his mother is also a musician and after seeing an episode of the cartoon series Tom and Jerry that features Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt. Lang decided he wanted to be a pianist. He began lessons when he was three years old and was the winner of the Shenyang Piano Competition. When he was five years old he played his first piano recital. He was expelled by his tutor when he was nine years old due to apparent “lack of talent” but luckily a music teacher at his school saw his ability and asked him to perform Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 10 second movement.
He went on to study at the Beijing Conservatory of Music and in 1993 won the Xinghai National Piano Competition. The following year he won the Outstanding Artistic Performance first prize at Ettingen, Germany in the 1994 International Competition for Young Pianists In 1995 he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians in Japan and performed a solo with the Moscow Philharmonic. He became a featured soloist at the inaugural concert of the China Philharmonic Orchestra when he was 14 years old and when he was 15 he and his father relocated to the United States so he could take further studies at the Curtis Institute of Music.
His career took off after he’d completed his studies and performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a fill-in for the pianist Andrew Watts for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in 1999. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall with a sold out audience in 2001 and then went to Beijing with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Also in 2001 he made his debut at the BBC Proms and returned there to perform again at the 2003 BBC Proms with Leonard Slatkin at the First Night concert.
In 2006 he was the soloist on the score of The Painted Veil and also performed the same year on the DVD The Banquet. He also played at the opening concert of the 2006 FIFA World Cup’s commencement. He performed with the singer Andrea Bocelli in Italy in 2007, which appeared on the DVD Vivere Live in Tuscany. That same year he performed at the Nobel Prize concert in Stockholm and appeared at Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts’ New Year’s Eve gala opening in collaboration with Seiji Ozawa.
The next year, in 2008, he worked with Google and YouTube for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project, where he holds the title of First Ambassador. He performed with Herbie Hancock in a duo at the 50th Grammy Awards and then again for a TV advert for United Airlines. He was a soloist who played with the Vienna Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta at the concert the night before the final of the 2008 Euro Cup and he performed in front of possibly billions of people at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics at Beijing. That same year he launched the Lang Lang International Music Foundation to bring music to young people and published his autobiography Journey of a Thousand Miles, with a version entitled Playing with Flying Keys meant for younger readers. In 2009 he and Herbie Hancock worked on a world tour and that same year he performed for President Barack Obama at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo, Norway. He was also a person listed in the 2009 Time magazine 100 Most Influential People in the World.
When the 2010s came about he signed a contract with Sony and was chosen as the official worldwide ambassador to the Shanghai Expo in 2010 and in 2011 he performed in honour of China’s President, Hu Jintao at the White House State Dinner, but saw controversy when the song that he played, “My Motherland”, was interpreted as an insult by some Americans even though there were no lyrics sung. Also in 2011 he appeared at Last Night of the Proms and in 2012 played at Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert. That same year he gave master classes to pianists at the Royal College of Music and appeared in Gramophone magazine’s Hall of Fame. Also in 2012 he carried the London 2012 Olympic torch and was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work in the Schleswign-Holstein Musik Festival.
Moving on to 2013 he became a United Nations Messenger of Peace and in 2014 he collaborated with Metallica at the 56th Grammy Awards and that same year he performed at the Byblos International Festival in Lebanon, at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Asian Games and in St. Louis, Missouri, at the Red Velvet Ball with the St. Louis Symphony.
The following year was no less busy when he performed at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards, at a US Independence Day televised celebration and in an episode of the TV show “Mozart in the Jungle”. In 2016 he performed at the Vatican for Pope Francis but he took time out in 2017 when he had injured his left arm. In 2019 he married the pianist Gina Alice Redlinger with their first child being born in 2021.
The 2020s saw him performing in Central Park at Global Citizen Live and in Dubai at the Expo 2020 opening ceremony in 2021. In 2023 he played at the Coronation Concert which celebrated King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s coronation.
His recording output is massive but a select few where he is the primary or a featured artist include Amor de canciones, The Art of Lang Lang, Beethoven: Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor, Bach: Goldberg Variations, Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 4, Clementi: Sonatina No. 1, Dragon Songs, Dreams of China, Estudando Para o Vestibular, Forever You and Me, Hora de Dormir, Invierno Chill, Kanno: Flowers Will Bloom, Khachaturian: Children’s Album for Piano, Lang Lang at the Royal Albert Hall, Lang Lang: Live in Vienna, Liszt: My Piano Hero, Live at Carnegie Hall, The Magic of Lang Lang, Mananas Romanticas, Memory, Mendelssohn: The Essentials, Navidad Chill, New York Rhapsody, One World: Together at Home, Piano Book EP: Around the World, Piano Recitals, Quiet Christmas Tunes, Re Men Yin Wen Tong Ge Jing Xuan, The Romance of Rachmaninov, Spirituel Pop, Tchaikovsky: Children’s Album Op. 39-21 Sweet Dreams, The Chopin Dance Project, Time for Dreams and The Vienna Album along with Carte Blanche by Martha Argerich, Prokofiev 3 & Bartok 2 by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchesta Centennial Celebration 1918-2018 by The Cleveland Orhestra, The Placido Domingo Story by Placido Domingo, Pianola, Piano & Friends by Jools Holland, Electronica, Vol. 1: The Time Machine by Jean-Michel Jarre, Music of the Spheres by Mike Oldfield, Breathless by Schiller, In2ition by 2Cellos and The Mozart Album by the Vienna Philharmonic along with numerous others.
China Philharmonic Orchestra recordings
Yellow River Piano Concerto (Xian Xinghai/arranged by Yin Chengzong, Liu Zhuang, Chu Wanghua, Sheng Lihong, Shi Shucheng, Xu Feixing)
DG 477 6229 (CD: Dragon Songs)
Piano – Lang Lang
Conductor – Long Yu
Flute (Chinese) – Chen Shasha
Lute – Wu Yuxia
Sources:
- https://www.langlangofficial.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Lang
- https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lang-lang-mn0000010825/biography
- https://www.classicalarchives.com/feature/lang_lang_interview.html
- https://www.langlangfoundation.org/
- https://www.npr.org/artists/17022256/lang-lang
- https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/events/2023/lang-lang/
- https://www.britannica.com/art/piano
- https://www.un.org/en/messengers-peace/lang-lang
- https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1496244/bio/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
- https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lang-lang-mn0000010825/credits
- https://www.discogs.com/artist/984186-Lang-Lang