Lecture Series for Young Leaders

Lecture Series for Youth Leaders (VIII)

Guest Speaker:
Mr. Lang Lang
Young Chinese Pianist, First recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award (29 April, 2004)

Guest Moderator:
Ms. Shelley LEE Lai-kuen
Director, The Dragon Foundation
Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs

Date:
13 December 2004

Venue:
Tsuen Wan Town Hall Auditorium

 

As part of the “Lecture Series for Youth Leaders”, Mr. Lang Lang was invited to share his experiences and music with over 1,000 local youth.

   
  Mr. Lang Lang’s Background
   
   
  Lang Lang is the first Chinese pianist to be engaged by the Berlin Philharmonic and all “Big Five” American orchestras. In 2002, in recognition of his distinguished musical talent, he became the first recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. Lang has also appeared in Teen People’s issue highlighting the “Top Twenty Teens Who Will Change the World”.
   
   
  Born in 1982 in Shenyang, he began piano lessons at the age of three with Professor Zhu Ya-Fen. At the age of five he won the Shenyang Piano Competition and played his first public recital. At the age of 11, he won the first prize and award for outstanding artistic performance at the Fourth International Young Pianists Competition in Germany. In 1995, only 13 years of age, he played the complete Chopin 24 Etudes at Beijing Concert Hall and won first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Young Musicians’ Competition, held in Japan, where he performed the Chopin Concerto No. 2 with the Moscow Philharmonic. At 14 he was a featured soloist at the China National Symphony’s inaugural concert, attended by President Jiang Ze-Min. The following year he began studies with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.
   
   
 

An extraordinary breakthrough came in 1999, when he was 17, with his dramatic last-minute substitution (introduced by Isaac Stern) for an indisposed Andre Watts at the Ravinia Festival’s “Gala of the Century”, playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the Chicago Symphony. He has also performed with the most prominent American orchestras under Maazel, Welser-Most, Mehta, Tilson Thomas and Jansons, as well as with many other leading orchestras and conductors, including Barenboim, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Sawallisch and Temirkanov.
   
 
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