It's snobbery to censure a showman pianist Now imagine another performance where the sounds emanating from the piano have exactly the same expressive force, but they're played by the pianist with an air of studied neutrality, so you hardly notice his presence. Difficult, isn't it? In fact I would say it's impossible, and not just because performance always involves responding to the whole human being in front of us. It's because a lot of music from Beethoven onwards absolutely requires self-assertive performance. To avoid it out of some misguided loyalty to classical music's "purity"" robs the music of something essential. In any case, "depth"" has its own kind of showmanship. We've all seen those pianists who look upward with a soulful expression at a moment of exquisite pianissimo, as if they're about to receive the stigmata. Or - equally effective - the look of hunched concentration, as if they're communing with the keyboard. Sometimes these things seem real and telling, because they're allied to something in the sound and the overall conception. But in essence they're just as suspect as Lang Lang's most extravagant flourishes. We don't see that, because our culture has a stubborn preference for "depths"" over surfaces. It's a prejudice that earlier ages would have found mystifying. When Paganini burst onto the European stage in the 1820s, it was with a performance style that makes Lang Lang seem the epitome of classical restraint. He played the violin upside-down, he deliberately broke the strings so that he could astonish everyone by playing on just one, and he exuded a thrilling air of diablerie. It was pure hokum, yet it riveted the leading figures of European culture. The great poet Heinrich Heine saw Paganini and got completely carried away: ..."the tones of the violin grew ever more stormy and defiant, and the eyes of the terrible player sparkled with such a scornful lust of destruction, and his thin lips moved with such a horrible haste, that it seemed as if he murmured some old accursed charms to conjure the storm and loose the evil spirits that lie imprisoned in the abysses of the sea... so maddening was this vision that, to keep my senses, I closed my ears and shut my eyes."" Perhaps we have finer sensibilities than Heine, but somehow I doubt it. What all this suggests to me is that the relationship between sound and gesture and sense in classical performance is hugely complicated, much more so than the defenders of "purity"" would have us believe. This is surely a good thing. It makes the performance of classical music a live and risky thing, rather than the reverent revelation of a sacred text. Of course, performers can go too far, and no doubt Lang Lang often does. But let's be more generous towards this astonishing musician, who tends to receive either mindless adoration or contempt. He can do something the more subtle and admired pianists can't: reach out to a live audience of thousands, and by his larger-than-life style and expressive gestures, show them how to listen to the music. He's done wonders to raise the general awareness of the art form, and deserves better.