A piano star gains new perspective.
and ignorance, and always will.”
Mr. Zurbo’s challenge, named after his 20-month-old daughter, Cielo, is a case study in creativity.
He is not just a writer with four published novels, an oral history of Australian-rules football and eight children’s books. He is also a hard-living adventurer with hands he can’t close into fists after 30 years clearing trails and replanting forests in the Australian bush. Oystering at sunrise is his form of settling down.
Mr. Zurbo’s stories range from the joyous (Day 168: “Bare Feet”) to the absurd (Day 144: “Backwards With Billy Hanging”) to the lyrical (Day 7: “The World’s Smallest Sound”) and the personal (Day 133: “For Cielo”). None of them have been published in print, nor is there any marketing behind the project.
“That’s what’s so beautiful about it,” said Matt Ottley, who has illustrated award-winning children’s books such as “Luke’s Way of Looking.” “It’s generally just floating there in the net. It’s like coming across a really rich secret garden that nobody knew existed.”
That it comes from a man without a college degree, with a reputation for wilderness forestry and the occasional fistfight, makes it all the more astounding.
“The sensitivity and poetic beauty of some of his texts is hard to fathom,” said Helen Chamberlin, a retired Australian children’s books editor who worked with Mr. Zurbo on his 2015 picture book “Moon.” “He’d strike anyone who meets him as a rough diamond.”
Mr. Zurbo, 52, said the 365-day story project is meant to be a gift to Cielo, though he also wouldn’t mind a publisher picking a tale or two. Ultimately, he said, he’s trying to be a good parent, building on what his father, an illustrator, and mother, a doyenne of Melbourne’s avant-garde theater the Pram Factory, did for him: inspire a love of creativity.
Four hours after publishing the story about the dancing girl, he was in the kitchen mixing dinner’s leftovers with eggs to carry to work for lunch.
Stories, even at work, seemed to rise like tides. Mr. Zurbo said he had an idea for one inspired by the previous day’s tale of the dancing girl.
“She’s dancing with a monster no one can see,” he said. “And her brother, he doesn’t know it, but he’s making the monster laugh.”
Some of the stories in “Cielo” come from these kinds of iterations. But a lot of them start with people he’s met and what they tell him about their children.
Day 102: “The Best Skier in the World” is drawn from a friend whose son broke his leg skiing and needed cheering up. Day 209: “Austin’s First Game” is for Dave “Wally” Cusic, the club captain of his football club, the Dodges Ferry Sharks.
The tales are stories for the love of stories. “Cielo,” which is free, is a project as impractical and relentless as its creator.
“We’re jumping from rock to rock,” Mr. Zurbo said, “just trying to get across the stream.”
It was late one afternoon this spring, and the 19,000 seats in New York’s Madison Square Garden were empty as Billy Joel and Lang Lang began jamming onstage.
Pop’s piano man had invited the superstar classical pianist to make a guest appearance at his April show at the Garden, and they were rehearsing Mr. Joel’s “Root Beer Rag.”
Then they started goofing around. Suddenly they were trading riffs from Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto. They teamed up on some Bach. Finally, the two launched into the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
It was as good a sign as any that Mr. Lang — the world’s most famous, and bankable, concert pianist — is as skilled as ever, after an injury to his left arm in 2017 sidelined him for over a year.
After rebuilding his strength, he is returning in earnest this year. He is again appearing with the world’s leading orchestras. He is again promoting a new album. And he is again arousing the suspicion, if not hostility, of the classical field by applying lessons from the pop world to his career.
Mr. Lang, 37, is taking a break from the crowd-pleasing Romantic war horses he made his name with. Critics sometimes complained that those pieces brought out a hammy side to his playing; now he is winning praise with a reduced schedule of more refined works by Mozart and Beethoven.
It’s not that the old Lang Lang — which is to say the young, flamboyant Lang Lang — has disappeared completely.
Few other classical soloists make cameos at Billy Joel concerts or play with Metallica. Who else could get Steinway to name a new line of grand pianos for him? Or work with the director Ron Howard, who is developing a biopic based on Mr. Lang’s upbringing?
Mr. Lang attributed his injury to overwork: He had been touring with demanding pieces as he taught himself Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Mr. Lang wound up with tendinitis, which got bad enough that in April 2017, he decided to cancel a few months of concerts. In the end, he took more than a year off.
His choice of repertoire on his new album, “Piano Book,” is almost a taunt to those who have found his artistic choices overly safe: “Piano Book” is a collection of short, mostly greatest-hits pieces, like Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”
“A lot of people were like: ‘Are you serious? You’re playing ‘Fur Elise?’ ” Mr. Lang said.
But, he added, he recorded them because, quite simply, he likes them. Within four months of its release, Mr. Lang’s “Für Elise” had been streamed 5.1 million times on Spotify.
Mr. Lang was born in 1982 in Shenyang, China. His parents got him a piano when he was still a toddler, and he often cites a Tom and Jerry cartoon, “The Cat Concerto,” in which cat and mouse fight through Tom’s attempt to perform Liszt, as an early influence.
His father pushed him relentlessly, Mr. Lang wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Journey of a Thousand Miles,” and even urged Mr. Lang to kill himself after he was dropped by his first teacher in Beijing. “Die now rather than live in shame,” he recalled his father saying.
He almost gave up the piano then and there. But the moment of madness passed; father and son reconciled; and Mr. Lang returned to the piano.
When he was 17, his big break arrived as he filled in for André Watts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was an overnight sensation.
But prominent critics began decrying what they perceived as tastelessness in his playing. Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times, skewered Mr. Lang’s 2003 Carnegie Hall recital, writing that his playing was “often incoherent, self-indulgent and slambang crass.”
Audiences, however, have continued to be impressed as he has tried to balance humility and curiosity with Metallica, Mr. Joel and “Für Elise.”
“I really want to carry classical music into some new areas,” he said. “But sometimes I think, maybe it’s too far? Maybe I should pull back a little bit?”
And so, a few weeks after his cameo at the Garden, Mr. Lang was back at his day job, playing Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto in Germany.
In May, he played the same work in Los Angeles. There, it was part of a cycle of Beethoven’s five piano concertos; Mr. Lang was originally scheduled for the full cycle, but withdrew from all but the Second as his recovery continued.
Any doubts those cancellations raised about his abilities were dispelled by his nuanced, delicate performance. Mark Swed, the classical music critic of The Los Angeles Times, wrote in his review that it was “something people may well be talking about for years.”
“This was not so much Lang Lang returning,” he added, “as Lang Lang arriving.”
Ignoring the critics to play Billy Joel, Metallica or Für Elise.