Pianist Lang: a wayward spirit

At 20, pianist Lang Lang combines formidable -- if limited -- technique, uncanny showmanship and stylistic waywardness and vulgarity. That’s a potent mix that has jump-started his career and doubtless will carry him a long way.

It generated two encores after a widely cheered performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto Thursday with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion: Liszt’s arrangement of Schumann’s song “Widmung” (Dedication), almost amateurish in Lang’s reaching for expressivity, and the pianist’s own arrangement of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which got the Philharmonic audience clapping along. Move over, Horowitz.

Lang dedicated “Widmung” to Mehli Mehta, who died in October at age 94.

In Tchaikovsky, Lang played very loud and very soft, though hardly anything in between. He ventured the fastest, hardest octaves and the jazziest rhythms imaginable. He threw conductor Zubin Mehta at least one curve by suddenly changing the dynamic in one phrase from loud to soft, then back to loud.

But Mehta, the old pro, didn’t miss a beat. If anything, the conductor leaned over occasionally to emphasize where the beat was and perhaps to remind the young innovator that they were supposed to be playing the same game. Tchaikovsky, however, seemed quite secondary.

Mehta opened the program with a steady, monochromatic account of Liszt’s nearly monothematic “Orpheus,” and followed that with a sprawling reading of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.

In both works, the Philharmonic brass and winds were surprisingly sloppy and prone to pitch problems.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m.

Price: $14-$82.

Contact: (323) 850-2000.