"What a nice gift!" says Lang Lang during a break halfway through the sessions for his new coupling of Mozart piano concertos. "I never had a chance like this before; it's the Easter holiday, so there’s no-one here, and to have four days in this place is fantastic." He is talking about the opportunity te record amidst the old-style grandeur of the Goldener Seal in the Musikverein in Vienna, the city whose teeming and cultured musical life inspired Mozart to compose perhaps the greatest and certainly the most influential series of piano concertos ever. "When you are playing in Vienna, the whole culture around you gives an authentic feeling to the music-making. But it also really depends on who you are working with."
On this occasion, the person Lang Lang is working with is Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the 84-year-old Austrian conduotor revered and respected for his ability to match deep knowledge of the musical language and performing practices of the 17th and 18th centuries with an interpratative mind of sometimes startling originality. Harnoncourt's most recent Mozart recording was of his last three symphonies (presented as a three-part sequence under the title Instrumental Oratorium) with the Concentus Musicus Wien, the chamber orchestra he founded as long ago as 1953 to perform music from the Baroque and Classical periods using instruments of the time (subtly different from today's) and the performing conventions which the players of them would have understood. Today, though, the orchestra on the platform is the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, founded even earlier, in 1842, but superstars nevertheless of the modern orchestral scene. They make an interesting pair - the brilliant and effervescent pianist, still boyish and ready to listen and learn at 31, and the octogenarian maestro with gravelly voice, fiercely eapressive facial gestures and the experience of years to lend authority to his musical decision-making. "He’s more energetic than me - he doesn’t even have lunch!" jokes Lang Lang, before going on: "Nikolaus makes a big difference to me. I've never seen anyone with such a passionate way of working, or such authenticity. He has a way of explaining the music that takes me straight to the time it was composed. Somehow, when he says something, it becomes reality, and you actually feel ‘yes, this really works, it's not just a theory!’ That’s incredibly inspiring for rne." For Harnoncourt, too, this is a stimulating partnership. "lt's rare to find someone who is so open-minded," he says. "I can only work with soloists who are ready to collaborate with rne on a concept, and very seldom have I experienced a reading of the work that developed so quickly."
Mozart composed 27 piano concertos in total, but it is the 17 he wrote after moving from Salzburg to Vienna in 1781 to pursue a career as a freelance composer, teaeher and performing pianist that not only contain some of his greatest music but also did much to define the forrnal and expressive landscape of the concerto genre for generations to come. Starting with the three concertos K 413-415 in 1782 and ending with K 595 in 1791, the year of his death, these works lifted what had hitherto been a form designed principally for entertainment and display to new heights of compositional sophistication and emotional eloquence. They were richly tuneful and brilliantly virtuosic, but, more importantly, in their meticulous construction, luminous sound-worlds and sharply defined relationships between soloist and orchestra, they also brought into the realm of instrumental music, perhaps for the first time, the dramatic and musical qualities their composer had already learned in the opera house.
"You have to think as if you are in an opera," says Lang Lang, and indeed the Concerto in C minor, K 491, came into being amid a whirl ot operatic activity. Completed on 24 March 1786 and probably first performed at a concert Mozart gave the Following month, it was created at a time when work had begun on Le nozze di Figaro, when another, shorter opera, Der Schauspieldirektor, was also on the stocks, and when his five-year-old Idomeneo was being revived in Vienna, necessitating a plethora of changes and rewrites. Yet, in the midst of this, Mozart conjured up one of his greatest concertos, a work whose emotional subtlety and range might well be expected from the creator of Figaro, but also prove that in the concerto, as much as in opera, he was the master of his chosen form.
K 491 is one of only two Concertos Mozart composed in a minor key (the other being the D minor, K 466), and both reveal a vein of deep sadness not to be found in any other contemporary concerto. In K 491 in particular the mood is complex and changeable, yet always seemingly expressive of some intimate and unnameable sorrow articulated through a rich but predominantly sombre sound-world, even in the theme and variations that constitute the finale. K 453 is an earlier work, composed in 1784 for performance by one of Mozart’s talented pupils, Barbara Ployer, and while the piano part does not reach for the exuberant virtuosity of some of the concertos that Mozart intended for himself, it is in any case a work distinguished more by intimacy than extrovert brilliance. The second movement has more than a hint of the opera house about it, with the strings’ opening phrase and pause seeming like a question, while the finale, another variation set, bubbles with a chuckling wit that seems to have leapt straight out of a comic opera.
Mozart’s concertos, then, are rich with the eloquence of operatic dialogue, an ideal of music as speech in which Harnoncourt, for one, has always strongly believed. Lang Lang agrees with him, however, that it is not necessary to have a fully formed idea of a narrative in mind: "You kind of feel the story in your head, know that this passage means one kind ot mood, and from that you can develop your own thoughts. But you and the listener don't need to know exactly what the action is." He also recognizes the need to respond to the mercurial nature of the music. "You never get bored with Mozart - he gives you this ongoing challenge. When you think you are getting close to his style, he jumps to another level. He's always playing games with you, and you just have to catch his spirit."
This may be the first time Lang Lang has recorded any of Mozart's concertos, but he has played both K 453 and K 491 for 15 years. It was a sonata, however, that played an important part in his early life as a pianist, when his teacher played him a recording of Mozart’s C major Sonata, K 330, to cheer him up after he had suffered a setback in his ambition to enter the Beijing Conservatory at the age of nine. "Playing K 330 brought me hope again," he later recalled. In 2013 Lang Lang toured the world with a solo recital programme that included three Mozart sonatas, all of which were composed before his final move to Vienna in 1781 at the age of 25. K 282 (unusual for opening with a slow movement) and the more elegant but ultimately showier K 283 were both composed in Munich in early 1775, when Mozart was in the city to oversee the production of his opera La finta giardiniera; K 310, a stormier and emotionally deeper work, was written in the summer of 1778, during Mozart’s unsuccessful attempt to make his way in Paris. The second CD in this set offers these three sonatas as recorded at a recital at the Royal Albert Hall in London, when the Guardian's critic praised Lang Lang's "exhilarating flair and brilliance", "gracefully yet firmly profiled" melodic lines and "measured yet flexible approach to tempo that gave individual ideas space to breathe".
The difference in Mozartian experience between Harnoncourt and Lang Lang is a massive 50 years, longer than the composer’s entire life, and Lang Lang is well aware of the deceptive depth and subtlety of his music, which the great 20th-century pianist Artur Schnabel once described as "too easy for children, and too difficult for artists". Says Lang Lang, "On the surface, I would say Mozart’s music is not difficult to understand. Every child, including myself when I was four years old, plays Mozart. But to really understand Mozart and to really get his music into your soul, takes a real long time. I remember Vladimir Horowitz saying that he only started to enjoy playing Mozart when he was in his late seventies, and the reason he gave was that only then was he finally getting close to him. This gives you an idea of how difficult Mozart can be. It depends on how you understand it. If you only hear the notes and a nice melody, it’s easy to understand, but to get every turn and every note-length right, and to understand exactly how the different characters sing, and to be able to put the short phrasing within the larger musical context, it requires a lot of detail in your interpretation."