Lang Lang plays Beethoven’s first two piano concertos with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra across a three-night Barbican residency.
Lang Lang, the pianist of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, plays Beethoven with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in the Barbican from Thursday 11 March 2027. Andris Nelsons conducts the three-night residency.
Lang Lang was born in Shenyang in 1982. He began lessons at three after a Tom and Jerry cartoon set to Liszt caught his ear. At 15 he moved to Philadelphia to study with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute.
He became the first Chinese pianist engaged by the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. British television audiences know him as a judge on The Piano.
The residency falls in the year of Beethoven’s bicentenary. Lang Lang plays the First Piano Concerto on the Thursday and the Second on the Friday, paired with Stravinsky’s Petrushka and then The Firebird. On Saturday the orchestra closes alone with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and The Rite of Spring.
Nelsons, born in Riga in 1978, began as a trumpeter in the Latvian National Opera orchestra. He made his name in Britain as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He has led the Boston Symphony, since 2014, alongside the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig.