Nobody can accuse Lang Lang of taking a limited approach to the piano. His last project, released in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic, was a double album of Bach's Goldberg Variations, featuring two versions of that keyboard masterwork recorded live and in the studio. By comparison, his latest album could not be more different: Lang Lang: The Disney Book brings together transcriptions and arrangements of popular tunes from the world's most famous animated movie studio, spanning hits from the past 90 years.

It is a sumptuously recorded release featuring a raft of high-profile collaborators, including the tenor Andrea Bocelli, guitarist Miloš, vocalist Jon Batiste and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robert Ziegler. The album's line-up of arrangers is no less starry, ranging from celebrated classical musicians (Stephen Hough, Natalie Tenenbaum and Peter Dugan) to names more familiar in the world of popular entertainment (Thomas Lauderdale, David Hamilton and Randy Kerber).

‘I wanted to do this this programme for a while, but in the beginning we didn't know whether it would be Disney,’ says Lang Lang. ‘We prepared a lot of animation stuff from Tom and Jerry to The Flintstones, plus some Japanese manga and Transformers. But there's so much material it's hard to choose. That was the first challenge.

‘The second and the more important challenge was assembling the piano arrangements. I'm used to playing the best composers – Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt – and although the Disney tunes are great music, they were not written for the piano. The original arrangements were for band, symphony orchestra and voice. So how are you going to make a good quality of piano music rather than sounding like you are playing in some kind of bar or elevator?’

Lang Lang says the wrong transcription ‘can really harm you’ and your reputation if you are known – as he is – for excelling in the core classical repertoire. So what does he think makes a good transcription? ‘Stephen Hough is a good friend and he told me, “You cannot just play the melody – you really have to play as a pianist.” Although I'm not a composer I know what I want, so he helped to turn my ideas into reality.’

Another of Lang Lang's key collaborators for this project was Thomas Lauderdale, the lead musician of Pink Martini, which is described on its website as a ‘little orchestra crossing genres’. ‘Thomas does a lot of transcriptions of great 19th and 20th century music in today's styles,’ says Lang Lang. ‘He asked me “What type of music do you like?” and I said I wanted a variety of technically demanding arrangements, including pieces that sound like a Liszt Paganini Etude, a Chopin Nocturne and a Horowitz transcription. Along with the album's producer Ron Fair, he brought together a great group of composers to work with me.’

The pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to shape the transcriptions via ‘literally hundreds of calls with video’, says Lang Lang. ‘At first it was frustrating because the arrangements we made sounded like bar music! I said it will be horrible. I mean, I like bar music, but this was neither bar music nor classical music – it was nothing.’

As the project developed, however, more collaborators came on board and the final programme took shape. The whole process lasted three-and-a-half years with sessions in eight cities worldwide. Things also took a personal turn when Lang Lang welcomed the birth of his first child in January 2021 with his wife and fellow pianist Gina Alice Redlinger. This inspired the inclusion of Gina singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from the 1940 movie Pinocchio, which Lang Lang describes as ‘a tribute to our son’.

© SIMON WEBB

The album's deluxe edition boasts a running time of 99 minutes and 28 tracks. The earliest piece is ‘Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ from the short animation film Three Little Pigs, released in 1933 to great acclaim though later censored due to its inclusion of a Jewish stereotype deemed inappropriate after the Second World War. Other favourites from the Golden Era of Hollywood include hits from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Mary Poppins (1964) and The Jungle Book (1967), plus the Sherman Brothers' ‘It's a Small World’ written in 1964 for the boat ride of the same name now found at Disneylands around the world.

Stephen Hough's arrangements are undoubtedly among the album's most imaginative and virtuosic offerings, in particular his playfully pointillistic ‘The Bare Necessities’ (The Jungle Book) and touching solo piano version of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, which brings the album to a close with cascades of flowing filigree woven around the melody. Nathalie Tenenbaum also makes her mark in her dramatic and wide-ranging Mary Poppins Fantasy – clearly a homage to Horowitz, with echoes of his Carmen Fantasy.

These older tunes lend themselves well to transcriptions thanks to their affinity with classical music from the Late Romantic era, in which film composers of the pre-war generation had been steeped. Their melodic, harmonic and rhythmic invention provide the arrangers with plenty of fodder for development, whereas Disney's recent soundtracks have a more epic quality that calls for symphonic treatment. Perhaps the most successful of these arrangements is Randy Kerber's orchestration of ‘It's All Right’ from the 2020 movie Soul, where Lang Lang provides a relaxed jazzy accompaniment to Jon Batiste's evocative falsetto vocal.

Lang Lang is also particularly fond of the music for Encanto (2021), which he describes as ‘a story about Colombian civic work’. Its composer Lin-Manuel Miranda also wrote the hit musical Hamilton, ‘so it's the same kind of beautiful Latino music’. Here Lang Lang can be heard chanelling something of the son cubano style of the late Rubén González.

Aside from providing hours of entertaining listening, I wonder if this project has a deeper purpose for Lang Lang, who is known for his commitment to music education around the world. Does he hope that audiences who find their way to The Disney Book may explore further and discover his classical recordings? ‘There always will be people who say classical music should only be Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or whatever,’ he explains, ‘and that's fine, as everybody should have their own view. But in my opinion it's good for everyone to make great transcriptions of these fantastic, touching melodies.’

Lang Lang himself discovered classical music by watching the Tom and Jerry cartoon The Cat Concerto (1947), in which Tom performs Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 while Jerry scampers around inside the piano. ‘For children's education, animation in the best,’ says Lang Lang. ‘For example, as a child I liked Liszt but I didn't know who he was. But when I saw the Tom and Jerry cartoon I thought, “Wow!”. It gave me the imagination when I played another piece by Liszt to think, “Maybe this a little monkey here”. Because I was only five or six years old, so what could I understand?

‘Of course, now I am 40 years old I know it's not just about cats, mice and monkeys! But it has helped me to understand what music is for. I believe we should be very open towards to the meaning of music – we shouldn't just like Beethoven and nothing else. So this animation idea is designed to help people, particularly the younger generation, to understand and embrace classical music. That's why the majority of the transcriptions I've recorded are in classical styles.’

The link with Disney has a strong personal resonance for Lang Lang too. ‘When I was 13 I won the Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians and as a reward I received a visit to Tokyo Disneyland. It was the happiest time in my life. And at that time it was even more astounding than today. Children now have a lot of access to technology via tablet devices but back in the 90s – this was 1995 – when the toys talked to me it was really scary!’

Lang Lang travelled to Disneyland in California to shoot the promotional video for The Disney Book, which shows him performing Stephen Hough's arrangement of ‘Feed the Birds’ from Mary Poppins against the backdrop of Disneyland's ‘Sleeping Beauty Castle’ – a fantasy of turrets and pinnacles modelled on the castle built by Bavaria's King Ludwig II in honour of Richard Wagner. ‘On the day of the shooting I had to wake up at 4:30am in order to catch the silence at Disneyland before any visitors arrived,’ says Lang Lang. ‘After we finished I saw the big line-up of tourists arriving at around 7:30am. When the gates finally opened, everybody – no matter where they came from or what age there were – everybody became a kid as they stepped into the park for the first time. I thought that's quite fascinating, but it's also so weird!’