Turning Gravity into Grace

MALCOLM TROUP has three
encounters with the sublime

Three moments of 'amazing Grace' lit up London's musical skyline during May and June -- what used to be called the 'season' -- one of them earth-shakingly ambitious, the others more modest in scale, but all instances of when man's ascent to freedom is suddenly miraculously released from all the downward pulls of self-doubt and physical constraints. Thus we begin our search in those great palaces of culture, the Royal Albert Hall (2010) and Royal Festival Hall (2011), where Lang Lang twice evoked for me the presence of the sublime. What is the sublime, after all, but the measure of how far short we fall in comparison to the immensity of the universe we occupy and which we set ourselves in vain to master -- Kant's 'starry sky above us'? And a metaphor for this was surely the sight of diminutive Lang Lang in 2010 with only two hands to his credit weaving spells enough to silence and hold captive an audience of some five thousand in the overmastering spaces of the Albert Hall!..