Lang Lang is not your average concert pianist. Hailed as the "Tiger Woods of classical music" (before the golfer's dramatic fall from grace), the 27-year-old has been playing to sold-out houses around the world since the age of 17. He is the first Chinese pianist to play with the world's top orchestras and made his debut at the Carnegie Hall in New York aged 18. Last year, Time magazine included him in its annual list of the planet's 100 most influential people and his phenomenal technique and flamboyant style — he likes to throw his arms in the air and rock on his stool while he plays — have made him a star on YouTube and won him millions of young fans.
"I'm very passionate about what I do," he says. "I really make every effort to ensure everything works." "Everything" covers not just classes, which he gives regularly at conservatoires all over the world, but also an average of 125 concerts a year, private recitals (for which he is paid up to £170,000), album recordings, films and various public appearances.
Turned into a brand
On top of all this, he has obligations towards his sponsors, which include adidas, Sony, Audi, Montblanc, API (a Chinese merchant bank) and Aegon, an insurance company. Steinway & Sons sells a range of Lang Lang pianos, there are branded Montblanc watches and a Lang Lang line of black-and-gold adidas trainers. Like Paris Hilton and David Beckham, he has turned himself into a brand.
Of course one man cannot run an industry of this size on his own and Lang, who has been "based" (loosely speaking) in the United States ever since winning a scholarship to Philadelphia's elite Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 15, has the usual entourage of agents, managers, publicists, stylists and general dogsbodies. The one person who never leaves his side is his mother, Zhou Xiulan. "My mother is always with me," Lang confirms. Does he pay her? "No," he says. "She just does it for the love of mother."
The lengths to which Zhou and her husband, Lang Guoren, went to mould their son into a piano superstar have become part of Chinese legend. Living in the industrial town of Shenyang, in northeastern China, the couple scraped together the equivalent of £200 to buy Lang a piano when he was just three years old. His father, a policeman and a frustrated musician, then started the young boy on an intense programme of tuition.
At 5, Lang won his first competition and at 9, he and his father moved to Beijing so that Lang might have the chance of studying at the Central Conservatory of Music. The move meant Lang Gouren giving up his job and they were forced to live in slum conditions, depending on remittance money from Zhou, who stayed in Shenyang working as a telephone operator.
Determined that his son should become successful, Lang Guoren hired a private tutor and charged him with preparing Lang Lang for the competition to get into the conservatory. It was a tall order. There were only 12 slots and 2,000 applicants.
When the professor, acting on a false rumour about the family, withdrew his tuition, Lang Guoren became more intense still, telling his son he now had to practise even harder. Something had to give, and as Lang Lang recounts in his autobiography, Journey of a Thousand Miles, one afternoon during those early months in Beijing, it did. Late home from a choral rehearsal at school, Lang found his father in a state of hysteria. "It's too late for everything! Everything is ruined!"
Lang tried to explain himself but his father wouldn't listen. Lang Guoren picked up a bottle of antibiotic pills and thrust them towards his son. "Take these pills! Swallow all 30 pills right now! Everything will be over and you will be dead!" The boy only brought him to his senses by hammering his fists against the wall until they bled, shouting: "I hate my hands!"
Suddenly the red mist lifted and Lang Guoren rushed over to his son to stop him doing any more damage. But for months Lang Lang wouldn't talk to his father or play the piano; his rebellion only ending when he was 10 and he was finally accepted at the Beijing conservatory. Today, Lang says he feels sorry for his father and the pressure he must have been under at the time.
History's victim
Lang Guoren was the victim of two tectonic shifts in Chinese history: Mao's Cultural Revolution and the one-child policy that was introduced at the end of the Seventies. Under the former, the playing of Western classical music was forbidden. Instruments were destroyed and musicians, especially pianists, had their fingers broken, or worse, by the Red Guard. Then, when people like Lang Guoren became parents themselves, not only were they desperate to pursue their thwarted ambitions through their children but all that frustration was heaped on to the shoulders of just one child.
That pressure still exists today. Lang's publicists like to talk about "the Lang Lang effect". They say 30 million children in China have been turned on to the piano by the virtuoso. But Nancy Pellegrini, the classical and performance editor of Time Out in Beijing and Shanghai says the Lang Lang effect is not something to be celebrated. "In developing countries, music is seen as a way out of poverty," she tells me. "Since the success of Lang Lang, people think that if you're good at piano you can become an international superstar with more money than you know what to do with. So a lot of children have been pushed into piano."
"When I was a child I thought competition was everything," Lang Lang says. "I thought if you won the competition you were the best. But then there were times when I didn't win, I wasn't even in the final and I realised that it wasn't everything. It's really the process of making music, that's what's really important."
Fame itself, he says, should never be the objective. "Of course I hope everybody can achieve their dreams but my point is, don't drive yourself crazy to become something that maybe you don't want to be. For me, still today, it's the enjoyment. The reason why I perform every second or third day is because I love it. It's not because, this night I get paid so much. On stage I find myself."
So, is he happy? After leading such a pressurised life for so long, many suspect he is on the verge of burnout. "I'm extremely happy," he says, smiling. "Whether I'm teaching or whatever. Being on stage is the best thing. It's like ‘wow', it's a totally different world." As our interview ends, I am not sure whether to believe him or not.
