Lang Lang

If a night at the orchestra were a pure investment-return transaction, Lang Lang certainly gave Thursday's audience its money's worth. It's when the actual music entered the equation that things got a little dicey. You had to look past a lot to hear it. At the front of Verizon Hall stage, with Simon Rattle leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist air-conducted or air-trilled with an idle hand when Beethoven failed to give him enough to do, mugged all manner of facial expressions, and kept leaning out to look at the audience, as if to ask: Do you like this?

As a breed, there's probably no group that more loudly pines for a restoration of individualism than classical music fans. Then along comes an individualist, and you can almost set your watch by the 3.8 seconds it takes before hearing the cries of artistic perfidy. You can't have it both ways, as Lang Lang reminded us Sunday night in Verizon Hall. Sure, his recital of Schubert, Bart?k, Debussy and Chopin was full of strangely mannered playing. But there's a trade-off: His ideas, all his own, are convincingly expressed.

No matter what you considered the delights and the horrors to be at Lang Lang's Tuesday recital at the Kimmel Center, one thing was certain: It was all bound to happen. Only four years ago, the China-born, Curtis Institute of Music-trained pianist was living in a one-bedroom apartment on Spruce Street with his parents and a Steinway piano, just a block from what is now the Kimmel Center. He has since become one of the best-selling classical pianists on the CD market, and on Tuesday, he was greeted by a full house at Verizon Hall.

No one in classical music is as hot as Lang Lang, the remarkable Chinese pianist whose procession from astounding prodigy to star during his years at Curtis Institute had Philadelphia audiences embracing him like a rock icon. While still studying with Gary Graffman at Curtis, he played the final Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Academy of Music and early concerts with the orchestra in its new home, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts. He even went on the orchestra's 2001 Asian tour, playing before his family and an audience of 8,000 at the Grand Hall of the People in Beijing - the thrill of a lifetime for a lad of 19. Lang's ability to learn large pieces and play them with a bravura flair stunned audiences.

If you shut your eyes at Tuesday's Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra concert at the Kimmel Center, your musical memories could have taken you to a darker, distant place and time, far from Vienna or Philadelphia - Lincoln Center in New York's messy early '80s. During the first three movements of Schubert's Symphony No. 9, I kept hearing the New York Philharmonic during that depressed era in its history. An unhappy time-travel experience, it was one whose common denominator, then and now, was Zubin Mehta.

Another Lang Lang debut, another triumph. In all other respects, nothing was predictable when the 19-year-old, China-born, Philadelphia-based pianist tore into Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 at his Thursday night debut with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. It was anything but a rerun of his Prokofiev performance in December with Wolfgang Sawallish and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Then, he played the often-spiky concerto interpreted through the elegant, orderly, coloristic lens of Ravel.

Most of what you need to know about Lang Lang came in a single note during an encore to his recital Friday night. The piece was "Stars and Stripes Forever. " And the note was the pickup to the more lyrical melodic section - you know, the quiet tune to which everyone likes to make up words. The pianist used that one note to send a message. He held it good and long, so long that it broke the momentum, like a tenor holding a high C. With it, he seemed to say, "I have just as big an influence here as the composer, and here's who I am. " The audience got it. Laughter rippled across the crowd.

If anybody needed convincing that Lang Lang isn't just a pianist with hot fingers, cool clothes, and lots of self-promotion, positive proof came in both concertos he played with the Philadelphia Orchestra this week at Verizon Hall. Played on Thursday, Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 will also be heard by the masses at his Saturday concert and cinemacast with the orchestra, as well as at the Monday repeat screening. Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 was reserved for the live-only audience on Friday at the Kimmel Center and for Tuesday, when he and the orchestra play Carnegie Hall.

Opening nights at the Philadelphia Orchestra aren't concerts so much as demonstrations. They function to remind the city's movers and shakers why the orchestra is such a point of civic pride that it deserves so much financial care and feeding. To that end, the Thursday night event at the Kimmel Center can be called a mission thoroughly accomplished, though the real season began, for me, yesterday afternoon. While yesterday had Shostakovich's disturbing Symphony No. 5, Thursday's 80-minute, intermissionless program had Tchaikovsky's less-sticky Francesca da Rimini tone poem, in a painless classical-music encounter for non-symphonygoers.

The idea of pianist Lang Lang and conductor Riccardo Muti collaborating for the first time in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 boggles the mind with possibilities - the inspiration! the overkill! the flying hair! - even if you haven't followed the Philadelphia ups and downs of these two artists. The pairing all but guarantees full houses at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, where they've commandeered the New York Philharmonic through Tuesday. Considering how these rather different titans might clash, Thursday's open rehearsal promised to be as revealing as the performance.

If a night at the orchestra were a pure investment-return transaction, Lang Lang certainly gave Thursday's audience its money's worth. It's when the actual music entered the equation that things got a little dicey. You had to look past a lot to hear it. At the front of Verizon Hall stage, with Simon Rattle leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist air-conducted or air-trilled with an idle hand when Beethoven failed to give him enough to do, mugged all manner of facial expressions, and kept leaning out to look at the audience, as if to ask: Do you like this?

  No psychedelic rays are emanating from his hands. He's not even trussed up in the latest Berlin fashions. The cover of his newest disc, The Chopin Album , is plainly, simply him. No one has ever accused Lang Lang of playing too many notes. But you could easily criticize him for wearing too many clothes. The Chopin Album (Sony Classical ***1/2) telegraphs, from a marketing standpoint, what many have known all along: For all of Lang Lang's outward excesses, he's a serious pianist and one who increasingly has adult depths, borne out by his music-making in this first all-Chopin disc of solo piano music that stands well among several recent Chopin releases, even eclipsing the eminent Maurizio Pollini.

Conan (11 p.m., TBS) - Ashley Greene; comedian Hari Kondabolu. Late Show With David Letterman (11:35 p.m., CBS3) - Actor Martin Short; actress Kat Dennings. The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (11:35 p.m., NBC10) - Carol Burnett; Armie Hammer; Lang Lang and Students perform. Jimmy Kimmel Live (midnight, 6ABC) - Ty Burrell; Dancing With the Stars ; Psy performs.

Time and again in the summer months, you hear classical music concerts discussed with an air of impending defeat. We're powerless over the weather, say management types behind the scenes. The Mann Center sweltered this summer. In chilly Vail, the Philadelphia Orchestra's Brahms Symphony No. 4 had to be halted minutes after it began due to pelting rain. The Berlin Philharmonic was drowned out by rain this summer in one of its few outdoor outings. And with picnicing audiences, how much listening really goes on?

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Another YNS triumph? That phrase, once used in modified form as Leonard Bernstein went from success to success, also applies to the last two weeks in the life of the music-director-designate of the Philadelphia Orchestra. After an acclaimed Mostly Mozart Festival week in New York, Yannick Nézet-Séguin debuted at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center with his soon-to-be-orchestra and clearly won new admirers, especially at the Wednesday program featuring Lang Lang playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Brahms' Symphony No. 4 . At Thursday's "Italian Opera Night," the spotlight was on singers Angela Meade and Bryan Hymel, both Academy of Vocal Arts graduates, for an audience that seemed to be experiencing much of this music for the first time.

STUDENT RECITALS have bad reputations for being hard on the ears. Lucky for Philadelphia, students at the Curtis Institute are far more accomplished than the average 10-year-old learning the saxophone. The Curtis Institute is one of the most selective music institutes in the world; it enrolls fewer than 200 new students a year. The school's alumni are a Who's Who of classical music: violinists Hilary Hahn and Leila Josefowicz, composer Samuel Barber, opera soprano Anna Moffo and conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein, to name a few. At any Curtis student recital, you could witness a nascent superstar like Lang Lang.

The Philadelphia Orchestra had a moment in the sun last month with a national cinemacast starring pianist Lang Lang in movie theaters across the country - though the morning after doesn't look so glorious. When the companion DVD to Lang Lang's Liszt: My Piano Hero album comes out Nov. 22 on Sony Classical, the Philadelphia Orchestra's portion won't be on it. Mainly, the disc will feature the prerecorded solo concert he gave in London in May - the same one that preempted part of the orchestra's concert (Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 )

If anybody needed convincing that Lang Lang isn't just a pianist with hot fingers, cool clothes, and lots of self-promotion, positive proof came in both concertos he played with the Philadelphia Orchestra this week at Verizon Hall. Played on Thursday, Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 will also be heard by the masses at his Saturday concert and cinemacast with the orchestra, as well as at the Monday repeat screening. Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 was reserved for the live-only audience on Friday at the Kimmel Center and for Tuesday, when he and the orchestra play Carnegie Hall.

Underneath the big hair, behind the rock-star clothes, and despite the distracting paparazzi back home in China, he's still Lang Lang. As NCM Fathom technicians run miles of cables backstage at Verizon Hall in preparation for Saturday's live simulcast to 500 movie theaters across the country, pianist Lang Lang is bear-hugging Philadelphia Orchestra chief conductor Charles Dutoit and chatting about their favorite Beijing restaurants. Wide-eyed as ever, Lang Lang, 29, played through parts of the two concertos he'll play in his Thursday-through-Saturday concerts here.

After negotiations ending at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, Kimmel Center officials emerged with written assurance from leaders of IATSE Local 8, the stage workers' union, that performances would go on as scheduled through Oct. 23. The Philadelphia Orchestra's season opening Thursday, however, will still be held at Irvine Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Last week, concerned about a strike, the orchestra elected to move the concert to Irvine, which has roughly half the seats (1,260)