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Chinese pianist Lang Lang made time for table tennis even on Sunday, just one day ahead of his performance. The sport serves as a sort of warm-up for the young star.
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"I'm young and crazy. As I get older, I'll naturally regain my sanity,¡± says Chinese pianist Lang Lang at all of 22 years old. Perhaps you have to be crazy to play about 200 concerts a year with top conductors like Zubin Mehta, Christoph Eschenbach, Daniel Barenboim and Lorin Maazel. Now Lang is in Korea for a joint performance Eschenbach¡¯s Philadelphia Orchestra.
But on Sunday, the day before his performance, Lang went to a table tennis club in Seoul's Seocho-dong after finishing his daytime rehearsal. For this pianist, ping-pong is both relaxation and pre-performance warm-up. Smashing the ball around for about 30 minutes, breaking a sweat in the process, Lang starts pouring his heart out.
"Herbert von Karajan brought about a renaissance in classical music by making use of new technologies like video recordings. The 21st century could be called the multimedia era because of the Internet, animation, DVDs and games. Why is it that just because you're a classical musician, you have to be shut up inside your music?" he demands. "We may need a computer game that gives you a score as you play the piano so that children can be brought closer to classical music."
In April, the pianist played -- hair dyed green and face made up -- in front of the puppets of popular kids show "Sesame Street," and last month he performed on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." He's also a netizen who posts his "performance diaries" on his personal homepage (www.langlang.com) two or three times a month.
These days, it seems like Lang has a pianist¡¯s finger in every pie. In charge of the score for the film "Maestro," he's also scheduled to perform for the opening ceremony for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Old-school classical music fans may frown at the flashy gestures of the young performer. "Even if I read everything written about me and found some of it to be critical, I wouldn't care," he said, exhibiting a confidence sharp pens cannot pierce.
After causing a sensation with his debut performance at Carnegie Hall in New York in 2003, Lang's been a fast rising star on world stages. An admirer of Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein, he said, "I have no intention of becoming like them. I only want to become myself."
(Kim Seong-hyeon, danpa@chosun.com )
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