One is the piano-pop star of classical music, the other one of the fathers of historical performance practice. That of all Lang Lang, 32, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 85, got together for a Mozart Project, surprised even the experts. But her Sony album with concerts in G major and C minor, accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has become a surprisingly profound interpretation of these two piano concertos.
Harnoncourt began as a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan. In 1953 he co-founded with his wife Alice the Concentus Musicus, an ensemble that has been prescribed in the early music performance practice and still exists today. He is now one of the most esteemed conductors worldwide.
Lang Lang was born in Shenyang, China, his father worked as a police officer and leader of an orchestra, his mother was a telephone operator. Lang Lang is the most successful and most lucrative pianist of our time.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Harnoncourt, Mr. Lang, how did you meet?
long I am a great admirer of Maestro Harnoncourt, together we have listed the first piano concerto by Beethoven in 2010 with the Vienna Philharmonic. Just a few years earlier I had taken him into his beautiful old house in Salzburg with one of his friends. And since then we have been working on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: As it should have come to an incident with the pedal. You, Mr. Lang have ruined it.
Harnoncourt: It was not my instrument, and it was only the wire, which led to the pedal.
long Anyway, I always wanted to do with the maestro Mozart, Mozart my first album. In summer 2012, he finally said yes. He showed me in his score, which is important for him what is in this music. And then I worked for two years at these two Mozart concertos.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: It was worth it. Have you had contact during this time?
long Not really, but I have closely followed what the Maestro has made at this time, which albums he has released. Meanwhile, our recording is already third in the Chinese pop charts. Mozart is the most famous composer in China, Chopin, Beethoven and Bach.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Harnoncourt, when did you first hear of Lang Lang?
Harnoncourt: I think he has performed for the first time with the Vienna Philharmonic. And then he came because of Beethoven. Before the first test I wanted to talk to him. And you, Lang Lang, thought that this would only be a meeting of five minutes.
long Yes, as it is now internationally usual, I thought it would remain for a short hello.
Harnoncourt: We have two then worked for three hours in a concentrated Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. I do not like to meet a soloist for the first time on the podium in front of the orchestra. You never know if someone may have a prestige issue, or what he thinks. When Lang Lang, I realized there’s finally an all-time greats. I always had some problems with pianist since the death of Friedrich Gulda. And on the Mozart we both have prepared us very seriously. This was not one-sided
SPIEGEL ONLINE:. What did you see in this pianist what others might remain hidden?
Harnoncourt: I have found in him a partner. He is famous for, that he can do everything on the piano, and that he can play music from U to E-everything. Well, maybe he can not walk on his hands only. In our Mozart I have learned to appreciate his very serious approach.
long Maestro Harnoncourt has told me all the wealth and the background of this music. For example, what has meant a particular passage in Mozart’s time. This has really changed my attitude to music.
Harnoncourt: moment that was, as I said, not one-sided. There were a lot from him.
long And I also learned from him that one must be free. You can not play like a textbook, a free handling has encouraged me Maestro Harnoncourt. He has a magical inner strength that can affect humans. I remember the first sample, as he has just canceled after the beginning, the musicians explaining something, reproduced using, and then there was another orchestra. After all, these were the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, one of my favorite band! He tells a story, and then you know how to play something. He speaks in pictures.
Harnoncourt: I am a part of my existence also still wood sculptor.
long He makes wonderful woodwork, standing at his home. He is a true craftsman. Currently he is working on a bat with elephant tusks.
Harnoncourt: And with a trunk. In a so-called Möbius strip. This is almost an infinite loop without beginning or end, without the top and bottom.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: love the language of images and symbols.
Harnoncourt: The music that means to me that it is not enough written down to see the music on, you need as a musician and an instruction manual. Each musician today is equipped with the knowledge that every whole note equals 16 Sechzehntenl. This is not true in this purist point of view, of course. Music must live, must be free to flourish. And then there is today regarded as the highest form of musical skill to play totally together, to be in sync. This is of course wrong. Rather, it is a matter of judgment when something needs to be together, and when you need more freedom. The whole education of musicians today revolves around horizontal and vertical accuracy. In other words, the pitch must exactly agree, and the notes too. But you can not make music. This is boring as hell. I can not live with it anyway.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: is not just taught in China in this mechanical way music?
long This is a broad field. It very much depends on who you have as a teacher. I had a teacher who understands exactly Western culture.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You were lucky.
long Yes, I had. When one gets to a teacher who teaches the technique a while, but the culture does not understand, this is a disaster. Later in the US, I came to Gary Graffman, who had himself studied with the incomparable Vladimir Horowitz. Graffman followed the great tradition of the old sound. He has, so to speak, an old soul. Today we have this misconception that everything has to sound clean and smooth that one can not make any mistakes.
Harnoncourt: Security is no quality. Real quality can only arise on the brink of disaster.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: They both come from very different spheres. Mr. Harnoncourt, you have a feudal, deeply old European background, Mr. Lang, you have worked their way up from humble beginnings in a country that has long had no relationship to classical Western music to an international star of the piano. How did you come together artistically?
long I think a lot about what he told me about the folk dances and folk music from Salzburg and the Salzburger Land. I spent several summers in Austria, I feel almost like an Austrian, has an Austrian residence permit. When I play with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, I feel like an Austrian.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Talk about your childhood so different?
Harnoncourt: No, not so much. So we now have a lot of contact again not. Lang Lang are so many concerts a year. How many are there?
long 120
SPIEGEL ONLINE: It used to be up to 150 per year. And you, Mr. Harnoncourt, how many are you from?
Harnoncourt: I think the reps there are around 18 to 20
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Lang , ask Nikolaus Harnoncourt for advice?
long I have many questions to Nicholas, and he always tries to answer me so clear and well as possible. Even if I just ask him something about St. Stephen’s Cathedral here in Vienna. He explained everything to me that the cathedral is actually two towers should get one and was not completed, and so on. But I also wanted to know whether Vienna in the 18th century was already so like now. And we talked a lot about the musical tastes of Mozart’s time.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think Mr. Harnoncourt that you can pass on experience to someone who has never done this?
Harnoncourt: No, that’s impossible. Humanity evolves only in the technical field. As you can resign experiences in formulas, give it to someone and work forward. His findings in the emotional-fantastic range can not even weitergengeben the father to his son, because she does not believe and accept only their own experiences. Everyone starts at zero. That is why we sit morally still there, where we were already 5000 years ago.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: How are you two continue?
Harnoncourt: He has an incredibly busy schedule. And with me you always have to calculate also the approaching expiration date.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: It was a common Gershwin project the speech of the “Rhapsody in Blue”.
Harnoncourt: Play this?
long Yes, I’m going to play.
Harnoncourt: I have to think. I have a strong link to this composer. I was, I believe, one of the first European who has heard his music. My uncle was a friend of his, and Gershwin sent my father always the latest stuff in the thirties. My father played the piano and then I crawled there on the carpet around.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: If you occur because at least with the Mozart concerts live?
Harnoncourt: to make repertoire is not my way I just worked with the Viennese the “Unfinished” by Schubert, I no longer determined in the last ten years. listed. And I will certainly now never direct again in my life.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What makes you so sure?
Harnoncourt: I need to work out new pieces over and over again, I do not draw from a repertoire. It is impossible for me.
long I step straight on with a new solo program and study simultaneously the first concert of Rachmaninov and the concert of Schumann.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Harnoncourt, your career was relatively slow, your fame built up over decades on, before you were even attacked because of your pioneered the original sound. Envy Lang Lang for his rapid rise to global success or see his biography scary fast?
Harnoncourt: This is absolutely not scary. If someone still so zoom goes for a career in music such as he does, then you have to have no fear. And envy I do not know, at most while climbing in the mountains when I can not cope with a difficult place. Since I’m more worried about the completion of the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg.
long I’ve seen from the outside, it is a great building project.
Harnoncourt: I hope they do not forget, as has happened in the Munich Gasteig lifts, for pianos. Up to the conversion always four men had to carry the piano via a narrow staircase to the podium.
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