Herbie Hancock & Lang Lang at Royal Albert Hall London (part)

It was a marketing man's dream: the world's starriest, flashiest classical pianist, Lang Lang, together with one of the giants of jazz piano, Herbie Hancock.

If you stop to think about it, though, it's a bizarre pairing.

Hancock is a tremendous improviser and composer who played a big part in defining the typical jazz-funk sound of the Sixties and Seventies. Lang Lang is a classical pianist through and through, and Hancock's junior by a good 40 years. What on earth could they play together?

To create the illusion of common ground, Hancock had to move entirely into Lang Lang's world, and become a classical pianist.

Being a formidable musician with wide musical sympathies and a technique almost as fleet as Lang Lang's, he did it very well.

The performance of Vaughan Williams's Double Piano Concerto, in which the pianists were joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra, was really effective. Both pianists seemed genuinely to love the piece, a fascinating amalgam of Frenchified polytonal glitter with a mystical yearning that reminds you of Vaughan Williams's quintessentially English works such as Pilgrim's Progress.

After the interval things took a nose-dive. Lang Lang took Debussy's delicate and simple Prelude The Girl with the Flaxen Hair and destroyed it with exaggerated and arbitrary emphases.

Then he and Hancock played Ravel's Mother Goose Suite in a way that suggested they'd forgotten they were in the Albert Hall with a paying audience of many thousands. Most of it was so quiet it must have been inaudible in the balconies.

Then came Hancock's turn to improvise. "I wish I knew what I was going to do next," he said. I hoped this was a joke, but his desultory stringing together of a few 40-year-old hits proved it wasn't. Then came the nadir: a performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the piano part distributed between both pianists and souped up by each in his own way: Lisztian heroics from Lang Lang, jazzy cascades from Hancock.

Usually great artists spur each other on to greater heights; here Lang Lang and Hancock seemed to be engaged in a race to the bottom line, each trying to outdo each other in banalities. It was excruciating. The Philharmonia, thank God, played with its usual professionalism. Mark van de Wiel's clarinet solo in Rhapsody in Blue was the only genuinely musical thing I heard all evening. * Telegraph Rating: *

Category:

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[MrStrav81]

Lang Lang basically played what he usually plays. He made no effort to collaborate with Hancock really.

[MrStrav81]

@pickupdropov

Gallagher and Lang Lang would make a great duo.

[dshmanagement]

I knew he is a clown, but now he has won the patent. Shame.

[pickupdropov]

What a waste of two very talented players. Let's hear Lang Lang play Watermelon Man while Gallagher smashes his Steinway with an Axe. Now that's entertainment!

But seriously folks (rim shot) - the material could be way hipper than this.

[EbClectic]

that was a very hateful description

[princeashtonsdad]

Hancock was a classical prodigy and played with the Chicago symphony orchestra at age 11 well before his jazz days

[estudiomonteverdi]

jesus christ !