On Monday, precocious Chinese piano virtuoso Lang Lang opened at the Montreux Jazz Festival, teaming up with veteran Herbie Hancock in a show blending classical and jazz.

Beginning with Vaughan William's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, he assured the audience, "Don't worry there will be some jazzy stuff later on," before the pair bounced through a program embracing Ravel, Gershwin and Liszt.

This Saturday their barnstorming world tour takes them to London's Royal Albert Hall, and then it's the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland, before North American dates culminating at the Hollywood Bowl in August.   

Lang Lang is only the most famous of China's piano exports. Yundi Li, also 27, is hot on his heels: joint gold-medallist in last month's Van Cliburn competition and also signed to Deutsche Gramophon. And Yuja Wang, 22, signed to DG in January and was the star of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall in April.  

At times it's hard to believe that it was only in the 1960s in China that the piano was regarded as one of the most corruptingly decadent of Western musical instruments, and Liu Shih Kun, second-prize-winner in Moscow's Tchaikovsky piano competition, was sentenced to cleaning the toilets at the Central Conservatory of Music.

But this new wealth of top-end talent is no accident. In the 1980s China embraced the Suzuki method and produced a generation of child violinists. Now the country has gone mad for piano-playing and there are an estimated 15 million piano students in China.

Parents vie to get their children into the piano kindgartens springing up across China, where four and five-year-olds learn music alongside maths, Chinese and gymnastics. (There are 15 branches of the Jiang Jie music school in Beijing alone.) Lang Lang has reportedly said, "Tens of thousands of young pianists are in line behind me."

And piano-mania has spawned another industry touted as China's fastest-growing (alongside internet gaming and hybrid cars): piano production. One factory alone in Guangzhou, the Pearl River Company, is turning out 100,000 pianos a year.

Some of the people buying them, China's piano-parents, may hope that their child will be the next superstar. Others, like parents everywhere, just hope that learning the piano will be a good discipline, or make their child a well-rounded individual. A professor at one of China's music conservatories is quoted as saying: "Kids who are studying piano don't go wrong."

While Western audiences embrace these passionate and personable Chinese performers, it's interesting to note that China's pre-eminence in piano is causing a degree of consternation in her Korean neighbour.

A commentator writes in The Chosun Ilbo:  "The zeal for classical music in China resembles the one that spread among Koreans a generation ago... Koreans have taken pride in a music industry that was more strongly established than China's and demonstrated higher artistry than Japan's. Now, as China takes precedence in artistry and Korea's industry falls behind Japan's there is a growing sense that Korea is once again stuck in the middle."

Piccolo