Chinese pianist Lang Lang was born and bred to be a classical music superstar, said Tim Teeman in The Times (U.K.). While he was in the womb, his parents played him countless hours of Western classical music, hoping the rhythms would seep into his brain. And at age 9, Lang and his father moved to a Beijing slum so that he could attend a music academy in the capital; his mother stayed behind in northern China to earn enough money to support all three. In Beijing, Lang’s already strict father became even more demanding. When a famous piano tutor rejected Lang, his father called him a failure and ordered him to take an overdose of pills. Lang refused. “[My dad] will never forgive himself for some things,” says the 30-year-old virtuoso. “He feels incredible pain when people ask about [the suicide incident].” Why was his father so tough on him? “He was scared I wouldn’t achieve in my career like he hadn’t in his.” When his father was young, he played the erhu, a Chinese fiddle. But his dreams of becoming a professional musician died during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when the Communist Party banned nonrevolutionary music. “He flashed back to that when bringing me up. He didn’t want what happened to him to happen to me.”
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