Here is the article I wrote about him after the Hamburg interview, reproduced here by kind permission of PIANIST Magazine (and edited slightly now for updating).
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| George Li: plenty to smile about. Photo: Simon Fowler |
One of the great misconceptions about music
competitions is that a performer only benefits by winning first prize. But many
of these events offer young players, whether or not they emerge triumphant, an
exceptional platform to be heard by an audience that, with the advent of
Internet live streaming, can nowadays run to millions. Moreover, those who win
other prizes or simply catch the right person’s attention can find themselves
fortunate enough to have a vital launching pad.
George Li won silver medal at the
International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2015, when he was all of 19. The
youthful Chinese American pianist from Boston quickly captured the imagination
of a representative from the artists’ management firm Intermusica; a contract
followed. Now he has another contract, this time with Warner Classics, which
has signed him up for two recital discs and two with orchestra.
I caught up with the unassuming and highly
intelligent young musician in Hamburg, where he was making his debut at the
shiny new Elbphilharmonie with the Hamburg Philharmonic, playing Rachmaninoff’s
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for the first time. On stage his diminutive
figure gives the illusion that he could still be a schoolboy – but when he
starts to play, it’s another matter altogether. His musicianship is informed by
a fulsome emotional world, sensitivity to drama, directness of expression and distinctive
beauty of tone that together conspire to give him a strong personal voice at
the instrument.
His passion for communicative music-making,
he says, struck him in earnest when he first performed a Beethoven concerto
with orchestra in his early teens. “All of a sudden I felt like I had entered a
different world,” he says. “It was a unique and amazing experience: for the
first time I was feeling music a lot more emotionally, rather than just
remembering the right notes and where to come in. Afterwards people were coming
up to me and saying that listening to me had changed their lives. I was
shocked. I didn’t know before that music had that kind of power. After that, I
just wanted to be able to find that feeling again.”
George, aged 11, plays Liszt...[this is SO CUTE - he can only just reach the pedals, but plays like a total pro...]
Born in Boston to parents who had each
immigrated to the US from China, Li is the second of three musical children.
His younger brother, Andrew, is also a gifted pianist, he reports; and their
elder sister started piano lessons first, which spurred on the small George to
try it too. “Neither of our parents is a musician,” he says. “They grew up
during the Cultural Revolution and never had those opportunities.” His father
is a scientist, his mother an accountant, but there was always music around: Li’s
early musical memories include being taken to hear the Boston Symphony
Orchestra and the city’s series of celebrity recitals, “pianists like Evgeny Kissin
and Murray Perahia, who really inspired me a lot. And I remember that right
before I went to bed Mom used to turn on the classical radio station. All those
elements nudged me in that direction.”
He soon became a seasoned competition participant,
having taken part in local contests since the tender age of six. “It was
something a lot of Asian kids who play piano used to do,” he remarks. “Every
year they’d just try and see how they got on in competitions, as an incentive
to learn repertoire and push yourself a little further. I did that for three or
four years and then took it to another level.”
When he was 16, he was amazed to win an
award from the Gilmore Foundation, which in addition to its more famous surprise-prize
for established artists also selects young pianists to support. Li was its
youngest winner to date. “It’s a really prestigious award and I had no idea
because it’s anonymous – they don’t tell you anything until you get a phone
call,” he recalls. “I was in Europe at 2am when I got the call and I was in
shock – I was, like, ‘Wait, what did
I win?’ It was very helpful because it’s a big cash award and you can use it
for whatever you want, so it helped me save to get a new piano and set up a
website. I also played some concerts at the Gilmore Festival [in Kalamazoo,
Michigan], which is a really great place – people there are so warm and it’s a
great atmosphere.”
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| Photo: Simon Fowler |
A similarly life-changing event was the
Young Concert Artists Competition, which he won in 2010; the organisation then
managed his early career for three years. “They really helped me to jump-start
the performance lifestyle, building confidence and some kind of experience with
how that synergy and chemistry with the audience works,” he says. This helped
him to lay the foundations of a burgeoning career. He entered competition after
competition and soon prize heaped upon prize: second at the Gina Bachauer prize
in 2010, the Tabor Foundation Piano Award at the Verbier Festival 2012, first
prize at the Grand Prix Animato Piano Competition in Paris in 2014 – and plenty
more. Therefore when he went to Russia for the Tchaikovsky Competition, he was effectively
an old-timer.
The Tchaikovsky Competition proved beyond
his wildest dreams – see the box-out – but since then he has scarcely had a
chance to look back. He is particularly thrilled about making his first CD for
Warner Classics. “It’s a huge thing, recording a CD and having it released,
when there are so many recordings around. I’m so lucky!” he remarks. Recorded
live in concert in the Mariinsky Concert Hall, St Petersburg, it should hit the
shelves this autumn. The programme offers a distinctly unusual mix of
repertoire, from Haydn through Chopin and Rachmaninoff to Liszt – but there is,
Li says, method to the apparent madness.
“It takes the listener on a journey,” he
suggests. “The Haydn is elegant, but also has a rather sorrowful element. That
leads into the Chopin B flat minor ‘Funeral March’ Sonata: a very tragic piece which
holds the entire spectrum of aching loss. That goes further with the
Rachmaninoff Corelli Variations, a piece that is very special to me: it
definitely explores that darker area and plunges you towards so much variety in
shading, darkness and colouring of that feeling, and of course the ending is
heartbreaking. It’s like a swansong. At the end you’re surrounded by despair,
like a feeling from Dostoyevsky. But then the Liszt Consolation No.3 and
Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 bring you back and lift you up from that depression. It
takes you on a journey from darkness to light, from death to resurrection –
that’s the motif I’ve envisaged.”
The reference to Dostoyevsky is no
coincidence. Li is currently combining his meteoric career with studies not
only musical but also academic, taking a joint course between Harvard
University and the New England Conservatory. “I’m studying English Literature
at Harvard, which is great,” he says. “It helps me make music because music and
literature are so intertwined with each other, being able to experience
different emotions and feelings through different mediums. Understanding how
writers express themselves through words is helpful to understanding how
composers express themselves through music.”
His special literary enthusiasms include
English Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth; novels by Dostoyevsky and James
Joyce; and Shakespeare, which he says has proved a revelation. Not that the mix
of study and musical career is easy. “It’s been hard because I travel a lot,
and it’s hard to settle in, then leave and come back and have all this work to
do,” he acknowledges, “but it’s wonderful to be in class with so many people
who are brilliant in their own ways and to learn from them and the teachers.”
Tchaikovsky Competition Winners' Concert....with Gergiev and his toothpick
As for his mentors at the piano, he counts
among them Russell Sherman and his wife Wha Kyung Byun. “In general, I’ve been
so lucky to have the right teachers at the right times,” he says. “I studied
first with a Chinese piano teacher, Dorothy Shi, who really worked on my
technical foundation, building up a good, singing kind of sound, so that helped
with a sound foundation that I could build upon musically. Then I studied for
three years with the Chinese pianist Chengzong Yin, who won the silver medal of
the Tchaikovsky Competition the same year Ashkenazy and John Ogdon won joint first.
He really helped further the singing sound and deepened the musical side. Miss
Byun and Mr Sherman have helped to push me as a person and as a human being and
to refine my musicianship. I’m very grateful to them all and I’m still learning
from them today. It’s great to have a teacher who can nudge you in the right
direction if you’re straying too much towards impulsiveness and shift you back
to not going overboard with extremes.”
He admits he has learned some career lessons
the hard way. “The travel schedule was quite jarring at first, even until two
or three months ago,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of crazy things. In December [2016] I
went to China for 24 hours; I’d played a concert in St Petersburg a couple of days
before and then immediately flew to Miami for a concert, and the travelling was
just too much for me and I got sick and I still had to play two concerts after
that. That was a rough period.”
Unwinding, then? Rather unusually for a
musician, Li is a sports fanatic, especially where soccer is concerned. “I’m an
Arsenal fan,” he declares, “though unfortunately they haven’t been doing so
well recently!” [this was in March 2017- ed]. He enjoys playing soccer himself, when time allows, the big advantage
being that the sport is limited to footwork: “I can’t play basketball or
baseball because of my hands,” Li says, “but with soccer it’s much more
feasible to spend an hour now and then kicking the ball around with friends.
Exercise is really important to keep fit and relieve stress,” he adds
earnestly.
Li has already been in Britain this season, playing
the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.2 with the Philharmonia at the Royal
Festival Hall, and is making his recital debut in the Southbank
Centre’s International Piano Series at the Southbank Centre on 20 March 2018,
including some repertoire from his new CD. Meanwhile, he has been enjoying trips to the
Verbier Festival, Seattle, Sweden and plenty more performances around Europe. “There’s
a lot of great things coming up,” Li beams. That is putting it mildly.
GEORGE
LI ON…THE TCHAIKOVSKY INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION
“The Tchaikovsky Competition is a great
platform to show who you are and what you can bring towards music. And being in
that Russian culture for a month, you can see how much people there appreciate
music. For them it’s like the musical Olympics: they really love hearing you
play and you can feel their appreciation. That takes away some of the pressure
and the stress: when you enter, you see in the first few rows the jury sitting
there being stern and strict – but behind them, people with shining eyes.
“It was a long month with a lot of pressure,
but also I had a great time. Of course the competition pressures were always
there, but it was a special month. For three weeks I was just living in my
hotel and the conservatory, practising. In the final, fortunately I played on
the first day, so I was exhausted, but had time before the verdict was
announced to go sightseeing, relax and play a little soccer.
“I hadn’t expected to advance so far, so I was
in shock to get second prize. We didn’t have any idea in advance of the results,
so the announcement was very tension-filled. The finals were such a marathon,
emotionally, spiritually and mentally, because it’s two back-to-back concerti with
only a few minutes in between, so after finishing I felt completely drained.
But then seeing people come up and say how powerful it was and how much it
affected them – going back to the power of music and how much it can affect the
emotions – that really stayed with me. It’s always been a dream to share how I
feel about music with as many people as possible. So being there in Moscow was
a sublime feeling.”
UP
CLOSE
If
you could play only one piece from now on, what would it be?
For a solo piece, either Beethoven’s Sonata
Op.111 or the Schubert B flat major Sonata D960. For a concerto, Rachmaninoff’s
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – it’s so much fun!
If
you could play only the music of one composer from now on, who would it be?
Beethoven.
One
pianist you’d travel long and far to hear?
Vladimir Horowitz.
One
concert hall you’d like to play in?
The Elbphilharmonie or the Concertgebouw.
Any
technical troubles?
I have rather small hands, so Rachmaninoff
passagework can be difficult.
What
advice would you give to an amateur pianist about how to improve?
Experiment with the potential of what the
piano can do. It’s an orchestra in one instrument and based on that we can create
so many different kinds of sounds and different worlds. And work on singing
tone – it’s always the hardest thing, but something we’re constantly striving
for.
If
you weren’t a pianist, what would you be?
I would really love to work in English
literature. I love analysing things and going deep into the texts.
One
person you’d love to play for?
The Pope. I’m not religious, but I love the
spiritual vibe of cathedrals.
A
composer you’re not ready for?
Beethoven, though see above!
What
other kind of music do you like listening to?
I listen to pop music now and then.
