Pianist Li's performance shows prowess and promise

April 12, 2004|Globe Staff

Pianist Yundi Li has the talent, the looks, and the personal charisma to be a standard-bearer for a new generation of performers and audiences. Jordan Hall was sold out for his Boston debut recital Saturday night, and many children and young people were in the audience. They listened attentively, and after every piece they whooped and hollered approval; at the end they demanded three encores.

Li is only 21, and you can't hold it against him that he plays like a young man and not like an old master. To his credit, he doesn't imitate any of the old masters, preferring to offer his own take on the music, which on Saturday night was core repertoire for nearly every pianist, all four Chopin Scherzos and the Liszt Sonata. It isn't patronizing to observe that he has a lot to learn, both about the piano and about life, because he clearly knows this himself; he is offering us who he is now and where he is on his life journey.

In the first half of the program, the Scherzos, he didn't operate on quite the level one expected from his Deutsche Grammophon CDs, but that wasn't his fault -- he was battling a piano that wasn't in satisfactory or responsive shape. A technician spent the intermission working on the instrument, and the Liszt Sonata sounded better. Li's playing of the Scherzos was full of extraordinary detail. The gymnastics were not merely the result of working at the keyboard for seven or eight hours a day for 14 years, but also of gifts of ear and imagination that no amount of practicing can create. What these performances lacked was momentum, shape, and inevitability -- what the teacher of the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter identified as his student's "aerial view" of everything he played. Li's Scherzos were ravishing, but they advanced in fits and starts.

More overview was evident in the Liszt Sonata, which also boasted unforced power, stamina, and tensile strength, as well as a fair measure of elegance and personal poetry. The performance wasn't subtle, but it was honest and awesomely accomplished. The big technical stuff was superb, although he didn't bring out all of the thematic material that flies by in the filigree, and he seemed reluctant, or even unable, to offer a full, floating pianissimo unmuffled by the soft pedal.

The encores were more Liszt -- "La Campanella," for which he chose a meaningful tempo on his recording but ratcheted up too fast in concert, like nearly everyone else, and the paraphrase on the quartet from Verdi's "Rigoletto." From the athletic point of view, this was almost perfect, although from the musical point of view he failed to characterize the four distinct voices and their different states of emotion -- Gilda's line should be full of despair and tears, not a flippant series of repeated octaves. It was also clear that Li had never heard Caruso or John McCormack tease the big tune into pure seduction. An arrangement of a Chinese song, called "Sunflowers," someone said, was delightful, and many in the audience burst into applause when they recognized it. Already a folk hero to some of the world, Yundi Li has the makings of a hero for everyone.