Ex-Prodigy Delivering on Continued Promise

We knew him when and have observed his maturation process over years now. Lang Lang, the Chinese-born piano phenom and one of the world’s “household name” classical celebrities, has made Santa Barbara a stopping and stomping ground fairly regularly since his local debut in 2003, at the almost-ripe age of 20. His latest stop came in a grand Granada Theatre recital, a starry kickoff to the classical portion of the UCSB Arts & Lectures series.

As with another now-prominent pianist, Yuja Wang, locals have caught wind of the phenom in a seminal burst of glory and career-launching gusto. Audiences crooned over his breezily virtuosic technique and his sometimes over-the-top showmanship as an interpreter, while some observers cried foul, or at least semi-foul. 

The matured, 44-year-old Lang, as heard at the Granada, is a more nuanced and relaxed model. He may still err on the side of bumped-up tempos and may exaggerate moments of soft-to-loud dynamic contouring for easy dramatic effect, but Lang projects a clear and confident voice. The Lang we heard most recently was a richer, deeper artistic presence.

Three years ago, Lang appeared here, taking on any pianist’s implicit challenge of diving into Bach’s towering “Goldberg Variations,” which he recorded in 2021. In 2026, Lang’s Granada setlist leaned into the solid stuff of Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt, with a sidebar into things Spanish, by Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Granados.

He opened gently, and with a delicate touch with Mozart’s Rondo in D, K. 485, before getting into the meatier and more dynamically charged world of Beethoven sonatas, from vastly different corners of the composer’s career. From Beethoven’s earlier period, the ever-popular 1789-vintage “Pathetique” emerged in polished, elegant and duly energized form in Lang’s hands, its stately Adagio treated in tender caressing terms, and whizzing through the rushing paces of the final movement.

But the real heart of the concert came with Beethoven’s No. 31 Opus 110, his penultimate piano sonata, written in 1821 — six years before his death and one of the fabled late sonatas embodying a profound body of work in the history of classical piano literature. At the Granada, he — and we — felt the gravitas of the Adagio movement, which also now carries the weight of our awareness of Beethoven’s debilitating deafness by that point in his life. Inner torment wends into the music. 

Life and a renewed spirit spring up, however, in a flurry of fugue action in the sonata’s last phase, an occasion which Lang easily rose to with virtuosic flair.

After intermission, Albeniz’s Suite Española No. 1 opened with a calming balm of the “Granada” movement from six movements based on places in the Spain and the Spanish diaspora, closing with “Cuba.” This suite, though written for piano, is also well-known in its guitar transcription, made famous by Andres Segovia. The mercurial “Seville” is a meal unto itself, a sub-suite in miniature.

In the other Spanish music turn, Lang brought a proper pictorial elan to a movement from Granados’s “Goyescas,” based on the art of Francisco Goya. Finally, the pianist was able to at last unleash his inner fireworks-generating side on two short pieces by Liszt — “Consolations” and “Venezia e Napoli.” 

For encores, Lang leaned into musical roads often taken — Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and a piano arrangement of the theme from the film La La Land, replete with a brief attempt at jazz pianism. Lang can handle virtually any classical repertoire challenge, but this did not quite go well.

Post-concert, some of us popped next door to the Grand on State to hear actual jazz, played at a lofty level by vocalist Janis Mann and her fine pianist, Andy Langham. That Grand on State encounter seemed to be the right, swinging cherry on top of an evening teeming with piano playing of a high order on this block of State Street.