"With Piano Book I'm going back to my first love, to the pieces that made me want to become a musician in the first place," says Lang Lang. Is it true, or is it a marketing concept from the folks at Deutsche Grammophon? Probably the latter, inasmuch as several pieces on the album (Yann Tiersen's La valse d'Amélie and especially Max Richter's The Departure, composed for a television soundtrack in the mid-2010s) were composed too late to have performed such a function. As if to acknowledge this, the album graphics also ...
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"With Piano Book I'm going back to my first love, to the pieces that made me want to become a musician in the first place," says Lang Lang. Is it true, or is it a marketing concept from the folks at Deutsche Grammophon? Probably the latter, inasmuch as several pieces on the album (Yann Tiersen's La valse d'Amélie and especially Max Richter's The Departure, composed for a television soundtrack in the mid-2010s) were composed too late to have performed such a function. As if to acknowledge this, the album graphics also describe the program simply as a collection of piano favorites. This noted, what you get here would make an ideal gift for young pianists, who will have encountered many of these pieces in their own piano books. And if Richter and Tiersen are added to those as a result of Lang's sales here, so much the better. Lang certainly gives aspiring players an enviable smoothness and effortless charm to aspire to. There are several notable aspects, beginning with marketing: you can get the album in...
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