After his Swiss watch and perfume (‘Essence of my music’), Lang Lang’s latest branding exercise concerns piano education. The Lang Lang Piano Academy was launched in 2014 in partnership with Faber Music, and since then it has produced several publications, including Piano Method books for beginners and children.

This latest product in fact marks his return to recording following an interval of recovery from tendonitis. Presented in a fancy package, it consists of a score and accompanying CD (with plenty of arty vanity photos for the aficionados), containing a collection of ‘miniature masterpieces’ that supposedly shaped him as a player and ‘created my great passion for piano’. The choice is eclectic: from folk tunes to silly tunes (Chopsticks), from ‘classic favourites’ to film themes, presented in no obvious order in terms of difficulty or style. In these respects it is hard to understand the pedagogical value. In fact not everything included here would be considered all that simple – take Mozart’s Ah, vous dirai-je, maman Variations, for instance – and perhaps a word of warning should be entered against taking on a piece too hard for the pianistic level of the learner.

Motivation seems to be Lang Lang’s principal teaching method – obviously an important complement, but only if some solid technique is being acquired along the way – and accordingly the book contains nothing that could be regarded as pedagogical, unless Lang Lang’s personal phrases on top of each piece count: ‘This is one of my favourite pieces!’; ‘I love this movie [Amélie] because it has a fairy-tale feel to the music’. There is also a copy of Für Elise with Lang Lang’s handwritten comments and recommendations, such as ‘Play from your heart’. Some of these he himself could have done with observing in his recording (‘Careful with the pedal’).

As for the recording, it is reassuring to see that, despite his intervening absence, nothing much has changed in Lang Lang’s playing, which is consistently exaggerated and over-pedalled, with generally hard and to my ears (in Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ or the middle section of Chopin’s ‘Raindrop’ Prelude) occasionally unpleasant sound. If you’ve missed watching him play, there are video clips for each track, including what could be a rough sketch of one of Nike’s ickiest ‘Believe in More’ adverts, for the Bach C major Prelude (available on the Gramophone website) and more recently one for his painfully stretched-out and pedal-inundated Clair de lune, filmed on a cruise boat in Paris.

Overall the project takes me back to the scene in Five Easy Pieces where Bobby Dupea, a former child prodigy pianist played by Jack Nicholson, having performed Chopin’s E minor Prelude, dismisses his deeply moved listener-lover, saying that he simply picked the easiest piece he could think of, and that he had played it better when he was eight: ‘I faked a little Chopin. You faked a big response.’