Born to perform

Classical pianist Yundi Li. (Roy Thompson Hall)

In China, there’s been a surge of interest in classical music of late: the conservatories are full, and the Communist country is among the top piano manufacturers in the world. China is also producing virtuoso performers. The most notable among them is Yundi Li, a pianist from Chongqing in central China who has become a celebrity in his native country and in the classical world. What’s more, Li’s prestige seems to be entirely positive — it’s actually fueling his art.

It all basically started when Li won first prize in the 2000 Frederic Chopin International Piano Competitionin Warsaw, Poland. At the time, Li was just 18, the youngest person ever to win and the only Chinese player ever to dominate this illustrious event.

“Winning made me feel the love of the audience,” said Li during an interview in mid-February, on the day of his debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. “It made me more ambitious as a piano player. That feeling is still growing inside me, more every day.”

Such rarefied competitions don’t necessarily lead to great careers or even notable public interest. Usually, the accolades produce just a tinkle of press before evaporating upon contact with our pop culture atmosphere. The honours are printed up on resumés as the winners hunt for teaching positions that can provide pleasant though unremarkable musical lives.

In the third round of the Chopin competition, Li performed the composer’s first piano concerto. His was a beautiful but familiar sort of sound. Li proved himself an inspired romantic with fabulous technique. After he won in Warsaw, Li further polished his unique talent with an elastic keyboard attack that seems to come straight from his bodily enthusiasm for performance. It’s like the music comes from his spine.

Unlike studious piano poets like Angela Hewitt or Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Li doesn’t talk much about the music as the driving force in his creativity. For Li, it’s about performing.

“I’m always trying to find a way to connect better with the audience,” he says. “That’s the most interesting thing to me about music. It makes me take chances on stage. It makes me always excited to perform. I’m always waiting to play, because I can’t wait to try out new ideas.” Li’s enthusiasm when speaking is sincere and uninhibited. His concentration on my questions is downright flattering.

Yundi Li is photographed by journalists during a performance in Hong Kong. (Samantha Sin/AFP/Getty Images)

The year after the competition, Li was signed as a Deutsche Grammophon recording artist. His rendition of Chopin’s 1837 Fantasie, Op. 66 demonstrated a manly edge, evoking a smoky saloon poignancy and Casablanca glamour. Li’s piano touch was crisp, but not percussive, and his lyric style playfully mechanical without sounding rough or impersonal. Argentine pianist Marta Augerich is an audible influence. Li’s is a modern sound, with a physical drive and precision that sacrifices none of Chopin’s timeless ennui. Li says his efforts are all geared toward holding the listener’s attention.

“I started off playing accordion,” he recalls, “and I would always make my family listen. I would get together all the relatives I could find and make them sit on the couch and listen. And I would play for as long as they would sit there.”

Soon, he became fascinated with the piano. Lack of Western schooling doesn’t seem to have hindered him at all, though until Li, exclusively Chinese training hadn’t yet produced a top soloist. Li’s dedication to performance is absolute.

“I get excited about playing in each city in the world,” says Li. “Whenever I finish performing somewhere, I can’t wait to play for those people again, and also in each hall again. Each concert hall is like an instrument, and whenever I leave one, I have to come back and try new things.” When talking about performance, Li’s eyes widen and his hands hover before him like he’s about to deliver a hug.

“Whenever I play, part of me cannot believe that once [in his early childhood] my audience was only family and friends, ” he says. “I need people. I have to perform for them. Sometimes, I want to please my audience so much that it makes me nervous. But nerves don’t disturb my concentration.”

Li’s latest disc features concertos by Prokofiev and Ravel with the Berlin Philharmonic, under the baton of Seiji Ozawa. This lineup underscores the classical world’s international flavour: a Chinese soloist performing Russian and French compositions with a German orchestra led by a Japanese conductor. (It should be noted that the orchestra’s performance is sublime.) Recording with the notoriously prickly Berlin Philharmonic is an even greater honour than appearing on the Deutsche Grammophon label, cementing Li’s position as a traveling artist with options.

The Chonqing native is clearly in a position to live wherever he wants and however he wants, but his heart still resides in his home country. And there are practical reasons for this.

“I still have a Chinese passport,” Li says. “Sometimes, it’s difficult to arrange the visas, but that’s not too important. I have a deep emotional relationship with China. I also have a young generation of fans there, and so does classical music. It’s very much a growing country, and there is lots of hype about classical there.

“After I won the Chopin [competition], I played for our president,” Li concludes. “When I return home, I’ll tour ten Chinese cities.”

There’s no mention of ideology — political or artistic. And, other than Li’s brief exhortation of the virtues of Prokofiev’s second piano concerto (“The hardest concerto,” according to Li), there’s no talk of composers, or specific pieces, or what music even “means” to him. With Li, all the world’s a stage, and words are beside the point.

Yundi Li performs at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall on March 18.

John Keillor is a Toronto writer.

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