Yundi receives affectionate welcome with all-Chopin programme, but missing nuance and over-pedalling prevent a truly spellbinding performance.
Yundi Li (piano) at Roy Thomson Hall, Saturday, Mar. 19, 2016.
An adoring, full house at Roy Thomson Hall on Saturday night thought Chinese superstar pianist Yundi – once known as Yundi Li – was fabulous, greeting the finale of the 33-year-old’s solo recital with an instant standing ovation and thunderous cheers.
It was an all-Chopin programme designed by this young romantic, and onetime winner of the Chopin International Piano Competition, to cast his talents in a most favourable light. He began with the four Ballades, and, following a short intermission, concluded with all 24 Préludes.
This was Chopin at his most diverse, stylistically, and demanding, both musically and virtuosically. Here, in 90-odd minutes of music, was a microcosm of the complete mid-19th-century artist’s world: one of expressing emotion through intricately wrought music, much of it condensed into miniatures.
Although the audience clearly found nothing to fault, this listener came away less than fully satisfied.
Yes, Yundi had a marvelous, easy technique and clear assurance at the keyboard – in this case a particularly fine recent product of Steinway & Sons’ New York piano works. His fingers flew, and he had a knack for colouring the pieces by pulling out inner voices.
Yes, the pianist covered all of the bases indicated in the printed score. But once the technical demands were checked off, one item was left wanting: a compelling sense of musical rhetoric that might truly lift the little black dots off the page and turn them into a spellbinding performance.
On Saturday night, at least, Yundi continually shied away from the little silences that punctuate musical phrases. He repeatedly left the sustaining pedal down, allowing one musical thought to just about blend into the subsequent one, before letting the dampers quell the resonating strings for a split second.
Again, although this didn’t go against anything in the printed source materials in the Ballades, this approach gave them a rushed quality, a feeling that the pianist wanted to get through each one as briskly as possible.
While this was just a niggle in the four Ballades, it became a major annoyance in the Préludes, each of which Chopin wrote as a standalone miniature. With only a split second’s pause between each one, the 24 pieces became a long, disjointed blur of varying styles, tempos and key signatures. It was the listener’s equivalent of watching someone sew together a quilt from mismatched pieces of cloth.
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