Listening to Lang Lang, I think of the absurdist pundit Stephen Colbert, who promises not to read the news to his viewers but to feel the news at them. Lang Lang feels the music at you, in ways both good and bad. He advertises his love of performing simply by the way he charges onstage, and he creates a giddy atmosphere as he negotiates hairpin turns at high speed. Stereotypes to the contrary, you wish at times that he were a little more impersonal.
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There’s something almost surreal in the sight and sound of a twenty-six-year-old playing with such unerring sophistication. Listening blind, you might take Biss to be an elderly gentleman of Budapest or Prague, one who has a faint childhood memory of what life was like before Hitler and TV. Sometimes I found myself wishing, perversely, that he would do something peculiar or crude, just for the sake of variety. Lang Lang is the kind of performer you really want to hear when he has grown up a bit and settled down. Biss, on the other hand, may someday wish to take a few more risks, to push against the flow of the music that he understands so well. Then again, why would he want to play differently when he is so close to perfection?
