The Wow Factor.

In the classical-music world of ten or fifteen years ago, you heard intermittent murmurs of unease about the number of Asian performers who were showing up on the rolls of conservatories, in the ranks of orchestras, and on concert stages. The oft-repeated criticism was that these players showed great technical dexterity but lacked the mysteries of "depth" and "soul." Such talk had an unsavory taste; Wagner used to say the same thing about musical Jews. In any case, the muttering has died down. When Yo-Yo Ma entrances audiences through the force of his personality, when Mitsuko Uchida delves deeper into Mozart and Schubert than almost any pianist alive, and when the virtuosos Lang Lang and Yundi Li conquer crowds with youthful bravado, notions of an "Asian type" can be filed away in the archive of dumb generalizations. The huge popularity of classical music in the Far East, and particularly in China, has created a talent pool a billion deep, from which a disarmingly varied group of musicians is emerging. The irony inherent in the old stereotype is that those fleet-fingered, impersonal performers (yes, there were some) replicated the values of a Western conservatory system that has long emphasized sheer technique at the expense of all else. The music world was, in effect, scapegoating Asians for its own defects.

Earlier this month, Lang Lang and Li appeared at Carnegie Hall forty-eight hours apart. Lang Lang played the Bartok Second Piano Concerto, with the Vienna Philharmonic, under Daniel Barenboim. Li played the Liszt First Piano Concerto, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, under Riccardo Chailly. The two pianists have a few things in common: both were born in China in 1982; both can execute rapid figuration and double octaves with almost irritating ease; both record for the Deutsche Grammophon label; and both are notable for the variety of their hair styles, ranging from the wavy to the spiky and back again. But they're hardly interchangeable.

Listening to Lang Lang, I think of the absurdist pundit Stephen Colbert, who promises not to read the news to his viewers but to feel the news at them. Lang Lang feels the music at you, in ways both good and bad. He advertises his love of performing simply by the way he charges onstage, and he creates a giddy atmosphere as he negotiates hairpin turns at high speed. Stereotypes to the contrary, you wish at times that he were a little more impersonal. He tends to impose his ebullience on the music, whether or not the music demands it. At his Carnegie Hall solo debut, in 2003, he memorably mangled a sequence of pieces by Schumann, Haydn, and Schubert, effectively rewriting them in a humid Romantic-Impressionist style. He is, however, steadily maturing as an artist, and already makes a less willful impression.

Pianists often mention the Bartok Second Concerto as the most taxing piece in the concerto repertory. (The Brahms Second and the Rachmaninoff Third are cited alongside it.) The difficulty lies not just in the writing itself but in the fact that the cascades of notes are intended to conjure a "light and popular" atmosphere, as Bartok himself said. This work, written in the wake of nineteen-twenties neoclassicism, sparkles with Baroque-style counterpoint and Classical melodic play. Lang Lang, who deserves credit for taking on such non-standard fare, flew through the music with ease, but his touch was too hard. He tended to bang out chords at the end of a phrase, relying on extraneous accents to give shape to a line rather than finding its inner contour. Bartok's requests for leggiero, dolce, and grazioso--light, sweet, graceful playing--often went unheeded; p became mf, mf became ff. Only in the final movement were he and the composer fully in synch. Grins broke out in the audience during the climactic passage where the pianist pounds the lower end of the instrument in tandem with the timpani and bass drum.

Yundi Li is a cooler presence. His playing is refined, almost severe. He has an intelligent way of shaping phrases, controlling dynamics, varying articulations. When Liszt uses the word dolcissimo in the score of the ...