Few citizens of the People’s Republic stand to benefit more from this summer’s Olympic Games, in Beijing, than a young man from the Manchurian city of Shenyang named Lang Lang. The son of a vice cop and a telephone operator, Lang Lang is no athlete—he is as sedentary as a veal calf in a dark shed—but he has prepared for the Games with the intensity of a middle-distance runner and the ecstatic anticipation of a groom. Unless Yao Ming, of the Houston Rockets, leads the Chinese past Kobe Bryant and the Americans to a gold medal, it is Lang Lang, a gifted pianist prone to red silk tuxedos and Lisztian histrionics at the keyboard, who is likeliest to emerge as the Chinese performer most enriched by the Olympics.
Lang Lang, whose everyday outfit is a black T-shirt, a silvery Versace jacket, jeans, and sneakers of his own design, will be a ubiquitous Olympic presence. He has already performed in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the one-year countdown to the Beijing Games, and the talk around the capital is that he will be a focal point of the opening ceremonies. (The program is a closely held secret. But, if Lang does play, one can assume that his costume will tend toward the Elton John circa “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” end of the sartorial spectrum.) He will attend several high-profile events in the role of international celebrity, and, because he is both engaging and a fluent English speaker, he’ll be put to work by the “Today” show. Bookstores will feature his new, as-told-to autobiography, “Journey of a Thousand Miles,” and record stores will display his recordings of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin, along with his best-selling album, “Dragon Songs,” a compilation of new and traditional Chinese music. Theatres will soon screen “Lang Lang’s Song for 2008,” an adoring documentary about his life. Perhaps the swiftest way to encapsulate his Olympian presence is to point out that one of the official pandas of the Beijing Games has been named after him.
Lang Lang and his management team, which is based in New York, have been anticipating this moment for at least three years. In the realm of high culture, Lang is China’s first crossover star, and the commercial world, foreign and domestic, has responded. He already has endorsement deals with Audi, Montblanc, Sony Electronics, Adidas, and Steinway, and in August he will be seen advertising their wares, on television and on billboards. His musical paean to the virtues of China Merchants Bank is already a staple of CCTV, and, in Shanghai, his face is on the side of hundreds of buses, a smiling endorsement of a mineral water from Tibet. Not long before I met Lang, in June in Beijing, he had been in the States recording a commercial for United Airlines—playing “Rhapsody in Blue” with Herbie Hancock.
“The Olympics are going to raise the profile, there’s no doubt,” Lang Lang said one day as he was riding to a book signing in downtown Beijing. “Pop stars aren’t taking advantage. They aren’t famous outside of China.”
At twenty-six, Lang Lang is no longer a prodigy. He is a serious and hard-working pianist who has been selling out Carnegie Hall and other major venues for five years. He is charming and unpretentious, though he has a penchant for moony gyrations and emotive expressions that tend to appall his critics. He is perhaps the showiest performer since Vladimir de Pachmann, a Chopin specialist of a century ago who used to milk cows to exercise his fingers and dip each digit in a glass of brandy before recitals. Lang’s irreverence is unabashed. One of the most popular clips of Lang Lang on YouTube shows him playing Chopin’s “Black Key” étude, Opus 10, No. 5, with an orange. Lang wears so much product in his hair that when he sways in rapture to his playing his head looks like a porcupine in a typhoon. As a homegrown cultural star, he has the support of a government that is eager to be seen as something more than the world’s most enormous market and workplace. “A country like China, which has developed so quickly economically, has to pay attention that it also becomes a civilized country, not just a gigantic national business,” the conductor Long Yu told me.
As China’s first for-export pianist, Lang Lang enjoys certain advantages. Just as the revolutionary director Sergei Eisenstein was able to call on the Soviet masses to people the crowd scenes of “Battleship Potemkin,” the producers of Lang’s mythopoetic bio-pic were able to call on workers paid a pittance to drag his grand piano to the ends and heights of the world. “Only in China,” as Lang said. In “Lang Lang’s Song,” you see him play a Steinway on the rocks near the Hukou Cascade, at an unlikely spot on the Great Wall, on an elevated platform overlooking the Huangpu River in Shanghai. J. Lo does not enjoy the same right-of-way in the Bronx that Lang does in China. The city of Beijing granted Lang access to the Temple of Heaven for half a day so that he could play Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto in solitude at the temple’s Yuanqiu altar, where the Chinese emperors once communed with the gods. “I love this shot!” Lang whispered to me one day at the film’s première in Beijing, as the waters of the Yellow River undulated in the belly curves of his piano.
Lang Lang is a superb, evolving musician, but he does not earn the money he does because he is better than, say, Maurizio Pollini, Martha Argerich, or, in truth, a dozen others. He earns it because of his shiny novelty and flair, and, perhaps especially, because he is an avatar of the Chinese ascendance. His rewards, by classical standards, are impressive. In the past several years, Lang has averaged a hundred and twenty-five concerts a year, and he usually gets fifty thousand dollars for a recital. His fee for a private corporate concert can be five times that, or more. “If you do five of those in a year, you’ve made enough to live on,” he said. His records sell up to two hundred thousand copies—“peanuts for a pop star, but good for classical.” The Olympics, he said, “can’t hurt with fees, and my negotiating power to promote classical music will get better, too.” His entrepreneurial role model, he said, is Tiger Woods. Lang’s commercial potential, especially in China, is such that his lawyers are trademarking his name—it appears on programs as “Lang Lang™.” His signature, which he fashions into the curvy shape of a piano, is also protected by Chinese law. “Lang Lang is a good name,” he said, “but it’s also a real name.”
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