Friday, in the first of a two-night stint, Lang Lang appeared at the 17,376-seat Hollywood Bowl, which was about half-filled. Still, the stellar Chinese pianist has moved up in the world.
Langs fans were no doubt in boxes and bleachers. But the yells were all, We love you, Herbie. A 27-year-old piano peacock and 69-year-old Herbie Hancock, a revered jazz pianist and composer, were the evenings odd couple. Joined by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by John Axelrod, the soloists played Vaughn Williams Concerto for Two Pianos, a bit of jazz and a two-piano Rhapsody in Blue blowout. Hancock was the master; Lang Lang, the cute, overeager undergraduate. There remains hope for a young musician with extraordinary gifts -- and concern.
The collaboration, begun as a Grammy invention on the 2008 show, grew into an international tour this summer concluding at the Hollywood Bowl. The concert also marked the beginning of Hancocks L.A. Philharmonic appointment as creative chair for jazz.
First things first, Hancock, who is classically trained but who has avoided that repertory for nearly five decades in public, proved an eloquent pianist by any standard. His technique is sure. He exhibits a revelatory of color. He phrases with grace. He plays from what appears a deep center, and in that regard, he is Lang Langs opposite. I find it hard to believe that he doesnt, in private, still practice to keep up his classical chops.
Vaughn Williams Concerto for Two Pianos was a strange choice to begin the program -- actually it opened with Axelrod leading a perfunctory performance of Mozarts Marriage of Figaro Overture. The 1946 score was the British composers attempt to salvage a savagely difficult 1930 piano concerto that was thought all but unplayable. Instead Vaughn Williams produced an even more impractical concerto that still didnt catch on, now requiring not one but two exceptional soloists apparently in the theory that, as Orrin Howard surmised in the Bowl program note, two virtuosos are better than one.
In fact, the concerto is a find. Hancock and Lang tore into it Friday, making much of the swirling first movement, capturing the shimmering British countryside quiet of the slow Romanza and knocking out the fugal Finale with tremendous lan. There was not, here, a lot of room for individuality, but in the Romanza, Hancocks collected cool and Langs gorgeous sparkle made for a stunning combination.
