Sunday, July 20, 2008

Lang Lang sounds as if he couldn't be more laid-back about classical music. Early in the Chinese-born pianist's memoir, Journey of a Thousand Miles (Spiegel & Grau, $24.95), he tells several stories about not minding gaffes made by audiences, including the Chinese habit of applauding between movements and this comment from a fan: "Hey, Lang Lang, I know that you're on Deutsche Grammophon. I see that Mozart has a deal on that label, too." "I'm happy," Lang Lang writes of this encounter. "I love the idea that the kid thinks that Mozart is alive and well." As a child, he says, he was influenced not so much by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky as by Tom and Jerry -- yes, the cartoon cat and mouse, stars of a vehicle called "The Cat Concerto," which Lang Lang first saw on TV shortly before he turned 2. What the cartoon characters taught him, he recalls, is that "playing the piano meant pranks. It meant fun." The corollary -- that "to be able to run over the keys like Tom chasing Jerry, I needed to practice" -- seems not to have fazed him at all.

Was playing the piano fun for Glenn Gould? It certainly wasn't a prankfest. As suggested by the subtitle of Katie Hafner's A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (Bloomsbury, $24.99), the Canadian virtuoso was a driven man whose eccentricities included wearing a hat and gloves even on hot days and renouncing the concert stage to perform exclusively in recording studios. After his death in 1982, a curious musician who had access to Gould's effects sat down to see if he could solve a longstanding puzzle. "During Gould's lifetime," Hafner writes, "fans had speculated that the piano he used must have been altered in some extraordinary way, perhaps rigged with special equipment that would make it possible for Gould's fingers to fly as fast as they did." But the interloper found no such thing: "Using ordinary tuning and regulating tools, a piano technician had managed to give the piano its hair-trigger action." This book is the story of Gould's "affair" with that particular instrument, which the artist once referred to as "a romance on three legs." The object of that romance has since traveled to Ottawa and Toronto, where it had a role in an acclaimed movie, "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould."

But what about those who will never be Lang Lang-style 88-key dudes nor Gouldish piano-fanatics -- who won't, in fact, perform in public at all? In Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson (Simon & Schuster, $24), piano teacher Tricia Tunstall says there's a special place in her heart for the ardent amateur, someone who feels "an internal necessity to play, and to play well." With certain young pupils, she observes, her task is not only to help them master a piece technically but also to express the emotion it's meant to carry. Fifteen-year-old Eddie, for example, at first can't quite do justice to the "turbulence" of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. So Tunstall sits down at the instrument and demonstrates the passage in question. When it's Eddie's turn, he rises to the hectic occasion. "Through playing," the author writes, "he was actually learning a new way to feel."

-- Dennis Drabelle