Howard Who?

When you’re one of the greatest pianists in the world at the moment, you can play to one of the great venues in the world, UCLA’s Royce Hall, and expect to get a few curtain calls. Well, all Yundi Li got was one at Thursday night’s concert during which he played an encore of a rather prosaic Chinese arrangement called Sun Flowers. While playing to his Chinese base, he seemed to ignore everyone else who was anticipating a concert of entirely different music. Perhaps that is why he didn’t get the extra ovation.

 The first half of the concert went without a hitch, a superb reading of Mozart followed by Schumann’s Carnaval. He sailed right through them, playing the Mozart without honoring any of the usual repeats and playing the Schumann with very little mannerism.

 When everyone came back from intermission however, we were treated to something else entirely. The program clearly stated that we were getting Lizst’s Rhapsodie Espagnole and Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise. Both of these pieces are rather genial and pleasant and certainly within Li’s style of cool, calm, delicate performance. Chopin is definitely Li’s strongest suit having won the Chopin Competition back in 2000.

 And then Li hits a note on the piano while the crowd still seems to be settling in. And those notes turn into Lizst’s B minor sonata.

 Now for those who know this extraordinary piece, it is very intense compared to what was scheduled. And its technical challenges are rather immense, even for someone of Li’s stature. Li performed the piece on his Lizst album to demonstrate his virtuosity. But to hear it live is another matter entirely. I had the Lizst album for some time but I honestly never got involved in the B minor sonata even though I did manage to sit through it once. It seemed overly theatrical.

 Well, that worked in its favor as Li dove into this work. It was more banging on the piano than in the entire first half of the piano. There were climactic builds to end all climactic builds and then those were followed with a single note dropped out of the blue like a ripple in a still pond. The organic nature of the melodies generating new chordals structures and permutations of the themes were as invigorating as they were also exhausting. By the end, the audience felt drained and some just left quite quickly.

 As people gave Li a standing ovation, the applause died down and grumblings could be heard about what he played or didn’t play. Certainly we were robbed of additional encore performances. Certainly we didn’t hear any of the signature Chopin that Li is known for. And certainly it was a fantastic effort that maintains Li as one of the most purely great pianists of our time. He represents tradition in the best possible way. Now if only he could represent modernity a little and through some better PR, warn us about changes in the program.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 9:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.