Lang Lang eager to hitch young pianists to his stardom

The accolades, the smears: Lang Lang has heard them all.

Critics tire of his skyward gazes. Musicians scrutinize his technique.

(Sean Gallup/GETTY IMAGES) - Star pianist Lang Lang.

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Novices know him as the world’s most dazzling pianist, the Liszt of the digital era. They know his “Flight of the Bumblebee” on an iPad, his incessant Twitter updates, and that he’s inspired 45 million children in China to take to the keys.

Over the past decade, at one time or another, Lang has embodied many and various assessments. An exuberant young showman, he weathered the praise and condemnation while navigating superstardom on multiple continents. His stagecraft, marked by raw emotion and virtuosic ability, helped him break free of the constraints of the concert hall. At the height of his celebrity, he leapt off the arts pages and into the global spotlight during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

But after years in the spotlight, the boy wonder has grown up. Lang Lang is now 30, and mentorship, not showmanship, is becoming his priority.

“Being 30, I’m still pretty young,” Lang said, laughing at the idea that his 30th birthday in June was a life-altering milestone. “I felt a little bit different after 21, like, ‘I’m not a piano prodigy anymore. . . . In the future, I would like to do more education initiatives for children. I want to work with different schools around the world to find a new way to teach, following the tradition, of course, to find a new method or way to think about piano.”

After starting his foundation four years ago, he has championed mentoring programs with young pianists. And on Sunday, Lang will begin a week-long residency at the Kennedy Center alongside one of his most influential mentors, Christoph Eschenbach, whom Lang still calls “a second father.”

In typical fashion, Lang’s residency will be crammed with events and concerts. He’ll perform six times in seven days, playing three Beethoven concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra and two solo recitals.

At the end of the week, the mentee will become mentor when Lang plays with 100 area children onstage for his popular “101 Pianists” workshop. Part master class and part performance, the program has invited young people ages 8 to 18 to play Franz Schubert's Marche Militaire No. 1 and Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5 en masse with Lang and one another. Local teachers were asked to recommend students for the program. Because of the huge response, the 100 students were chosen through a lottery at the Kennedy Center.

The program — which has been performed in Chicago, New York and San Francisco — reiterates Lang’s emphasis on the new generation, a priority that was passed down from mentor to mentee.

A meeting of mentors

The story is now part of Lang Lang lore.

It was 1999, and Andre Watts, who was ill with a high fever, was scheduled to perform at the summer Ravinia Festival outside Chicago. A replacement was needed to play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 . And Lang was there, waiting and ready for his break.

“I did not know him,” Eschenbach said. “Nobody knew him. I was supposed to listen to him for 20 minutes. It turned into an hour and half. I was so taken with the 17-year-old boy. How could he play everything with the same quality and musicality? . . . I was just amazed.”