When the San Diego Symphony announced its January, 2011, Lang Lang Concerto Festival, the Chinese piano superstar was slated to open with the Beethoven "Fourth Piano Concerto." Then someone knocked some marketing sense into the festival planners’ collective imagination, and at the last minute they substitued Rachmaninoff’s "Second Piano Concerto" for the Beethoven.

Given Lang Lang’s emotive personality and physical flamboyance at the keyboard, Rachmaninoff’s hyper-Romantic Second Piano Concerto—filled with sensuous, heart-palpitating melodies and thundering climaxes—was a match made in heaven. And the roars of approval from Friday’s (Jan. 14) packed house at Copley Symphony Hall only confirmed a musical choice that should have been obvious from the get-go.

I think it is safe to say that Lang’s approach to this concerto was highly intuitive, savoring rather than analyzing the composer’s constructions. He drew out the opening solo piano theme, for example, lingering over its delicious harmonic progressions. When he felt like slowing the concerto's tempo for dramatic effect, it was conductor Jahja Ling who had to make the quick adjustment (which he executed with complete finesse) and pull back his orchestra to accommodate Lang.

The pianist’s steady, upward gaze appeared to be fixed on some far-off vision, suggesting a rapt engagement with a more transcendent version of the concerto than the one taking place on stage. Clearly, his goal was to bring his listeners into his own spiritual realm, and his performance gave every appearance of success in meeting that aspiration.

Whatever can be said about his interpretive choices, and he rarely encounters a lily that he deems unworthy of gilding, his piano technique is 24 karat. I particularly liked his consistently warm, glowing tone, which he was able to maintain even in the piano’s highest registers, where the sound easily turns brittle and dull. In rapid passagework, his parallel octaves resounded with acute clarity and precise iteration. Whether the tempos were languorous or breakneck, he shaped the composer’s grand themes with fervent, thoughtful intensity.

Ling and the orchestra had already warmed up on Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” so they were more than ready to supply their guest with an opulent, Romantic sonority and keen sense of dramatic urgency. I would single out Principal Clarinet Sheryl Renk for her pliant solo at the opening of the second movement and the first violins for sensitive, suave incursions in that same movement. Bravo.

Following the Second Concerto, Lang kept the dreamy Rachmaninoff mood alive with his ruminative take on the composer’s “Prelude in D Major.”

I had higher expecations for the orchestra’s “Symphonic Dances,” which sounded unfocused at the outset, notably in the brass sections. But the performance improved as the work progressed through its effusive melodic laybrinth. When I attend Sunday’s concert, in which Lang will play the Tchaikovsky “First Piano Concerto,” I trust these imperfections will have been overcome. On Saturday, Lang will offer the Robert Schumann "Piano Concerto in A Minor."

Ling opened his program with John Adams’ four-minute, hyperkinetic “Short Ride on a Fast Machine,” which rattled the Copley rafters with good-humored flair. Wisely, the orchestra re-tuned after this noisy outing.

This evening of wall-to-wall Rachmaninoff brought about a modest reflection on this late-Romantic Russian composer who, because of the Russian revolution of 1917, left his native land and culture for the U.S. and ended his days in the comfortable environs of Beverly Hills. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, and even in his final years, he was considered hopelessly passé, out of step with any contemporary music school.

Aaron Copland, considered the dean of American composers at that time, despaired at the prospect of having to sit through a Rachmaninoff concerto or symphony. “All those notes—and to what end?” he complained. Donald Jay Grout’s “A History of Western Music,” the 800-page tome of required reading for every music major in an American conservatory or university music school for generations, could only spare two terse sentences about Rachmaninoff. Neither of them are flattering.

Yet concert audiences adore this music, and young piano virtuosi are perennially eager to demonstrate their capacity to subdue Rachmaninoff’s concertos. Like the operas of Puccini, these works speak to the heart with a craft that has been easily dismissed because, I believe, they accomplish that goal so effortlessly. And while Copland’s ballet scores are universally admired, I cannot ever recall an audience cheering on its feet after a Copland concerto!

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